Writing About Place

Posted on June 24, 2003 in Ecotone Originality & Creativity

Note: I’ve joined up with Ecotone, a wiki of bloggers who write about place. They’ve set a group topic “How I Started Thinking About Place – And Why I Started Writing About It”. This is my response.

I think and write about place because it’s there. Those who thwack at the skull, rend the writing of others into something other than the writing in the name of appreciating it won’t like this answer much. I’m not interested in motivations as much as I am interested in the details that fall together, like the grains of sand that collected here during the Eocene, cemented together, and became the hilltop on which I live.

Anyone who lives has a sense of where he or she exists. This is where the thinking comes from. The writing about it happens because the writer decides that the details are worth telling to the world. What we pick and choose tells others about us, whether we’re sexually charged, spiritually moved, or scientifically curious.

As I said at the beginning of this short and disappointing* essay, I write about place mostly just to pass on experience. Some say that the roots of our sense of place are in our childhood: of course this is true because we were all children once and it was during childhood that we first became aware of where we are. There’s a belief stemming from this that all writing is a returning, a bending back of the great life serpent to chew a bit on the tail. I do return in my writing, but I write about place as well as other topics just to live right now. We need not erect a mystery religion around an oak tree: just look at the tree, its slotted leaves, the acorns, the trunk, and the branches. Write about that.

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* Disappointing to others. I feel well satisfied with what I’ve said here and the length to which I’ve spoken to the topic.