Drenched in Thoughts of Place
Place as intoxicant, character & heart shatterer + a detailed exercise to get you there + a scrap from my novel + words from/about Dorothy Allison, Maggie Smith, Toni Morrison & Janet Burroway
photo: Ellen Koeniger, Lake George (1916) photo in high resolution by Alfred Stieglitz
[Welcome to your January edition of the monthly Writing in the Dark newsletter for paid subscribers. This edition includes a lengthy preview for all subscribers in case you want an idea of what the monthly WITD includes.]
Lately, I’ve been drenched in thoughts of place—how it sculpts our lives and our stories. How rolling hills frame perspective, mudslides threaten neighborhoods, forests breathe both life and fire, and the snowpack’s depth brings bounty or devastation. Forever, I’ve considered how cold weather can collapse us into ourselves, shriveling our skin and hardening our hair, while warm weather can unfurl our bodies, loosening our limbs and stretching our breastbones open like wings. Place tunes our speech—lengthening the sounds of our vowels or clipping them, sharpening our consonants or muddying them. And, oh, what place does to our hearts—pries them open, ignites them, softens them, shatters them. We carry place inside ourselves, too: places where we were born and where we gave birth. Where we hung from the monkey bars until our hands tore open, and where we watched our parents break each other. Where we swam naked in the moonless dark, and where we last saw our father years ago.
Dorothy Allison—how I adore her work and her brilliant mind—said about place in an essay originally published in The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House:
I cannot abide a story told to me by a numb, empty voice that never responds to anything that’s happening, that doesn’t express some feelings in response to what it sees. Place is not just what your feet are crossing to get to somewhere. Place is feeling, and feeling is something a character expresses. More, it is something the writer puts on the page—articulates with deliberate purpose. If you keep giving me these eyes that note all the details—if you tell me the lawn is manicured but you don’t tell me that it makes your character both deeply happy and slightly anxious—then I’m a little bit frustrated with you. I want a story that’ll pull me in. I want a story that makes me drunk. I want a story that feeds me glory. And most of all, I want a story I can trust. I want a story that is happening in a real place, which means a place that has meaning and that evokes emotions in the person who’s telling me the story. Place is emotion.
And here’s example of a writer—Kendare Blake—doing, I think, just as Dorothy Allison says to do. That is, writing about place in a way scratches through the veneer, goes beyond atmosphere and description to uncover the layers where character and setting meld:
Over the course of my life I've been to lots of places. Shadowed places where things have gone wrong. Sinister places where things still are. I always hate the sunlit towns, full of newly built developments with double-car garages in shades of pale eggshell, surrounded by green lawns and dotted with laughing children. Those towns aren't any less haunted than the others. They're just better liars. —from Anna Dressed in Blood
Inevitably, my own awareness of place has been heightened since January 11, when I left my home in Minneapolis—with my husband, Jon, and our little dog, Frannie—to drive 1,400 miles to the Forgotten Coast. I like saying that: Forgotten Coast. It sounds a little more romantic, a little more mysterious, than, say, the Florida panhandle, which is where the so-called Forgotten Coast actually is. Although I do quite like the word panhandle, too. Panhandle. It’s so tactile. I can feel the weight of the cast iron in my hand. I can smell the browned butter. I also like the word Apalachicola, which is the name of the town here that caught my attention two summers ago when I read that it was an affordable place to escape to in winter, and, according to Conde Nast Traveler, one of Florida’s best beach towns, not only because of its brilliant white sugar sand and bright blue waters, but also because of its architecture. Yes, architecture. From Conde Nast:
Strange as it may sound to those of us accustomed to soaring beachfront condos and time-shares, Apalachicola is packed with early 19th-Century antebellum Greek Revival plantation homes. The city, at one point the third biggest port in the Gulf of Mexico, was modeled on Philadelphia, and features the same kinds of lush garden squares that you’ll find in Savannah.
So, I’ll be here on the coast near Apalach, as the locals call it, until the end of February, working remotely in all the ways I normally work, but also walking those sugar sand beaches every single day and getting more sunshine in six weeks than I would normally get in an entire Minnesota winter.
I have two primary intentions while here.
First and foremost, I want to regain my full health after a long year of two bouts of Covid, one vicious flu, several stretches of severe respiratory viruses that seemed to cascade one into the next, and, to add insult to injury, a root canal. For me, 2022 was one hell of a year. So, yes, I’m hoping to recover my health.
Second, and also foremost, I’ll finish my novel draft this month. I cannot tell you what an excitement and relief this is to me. I don’t even care whether it’s any good. Why should I care? You see, I agree with Toni Morrison, who said in a 1980 interview:
[R]evision for me is the exciting part; it’s the part that I can’t wait for—getting the whole dumb thing done so that I can do the real work, which is making it better and better and better.
So, I will be finishing the whole dumb thing here so that I can finally get to the real work of making it better and better and better. How will I do this finishing, you might wonder, since being away from home does not relieve me of my work obligations? My post at the University is full time and I also teach through Elephant Rock (my Writing in the Dark workshop is underway right now) and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, too. Plus the inevitable other deadlines—this month, a craft piece for Assay and an essay for the Ilanot Review.
Will the ocean, on top of clearing my bronchial tubes and sinuses, also write my novel for me? Probably not. But being here does create more space in my schedule—because at home, I babysit our grandchildren an average of fifteen or more hours a week. That sounds like a lot, for a person who works full-time plus, but, if anything, it’s an underestimate. And … I love it. If you know me at all, you know I love children, all children, and especially these children. And I know it’s fleeting, this phase of life. So fleeting, with our oldest granddaughter starting kindergarten this fall and our youngest already two years old. The next time I blink, they will all be in elementary school, they will be tumbling and swimming and playing ukuleles, they will be going with friends to birthday parties and playdates and the beach and the apple orchard and the petting zoo and the sledding hill, and soon enough I will look back on these Sunday brunches, weeknight dinners, and Saturdays slumber parties, capped off as they are with viewings of The Red Balloon and chapters read aloud from Ramona as Esme and I marvel at the ceiling of our cozy attic dormer, glowing with golden stars projected by the old baby monitor—and wonder where in the world it all went, and how it disappeared so fast. So, no, I do not wish for it to change. Indeed, I can barely wait until Esme and her brother arrive here next week with their mother to search for seashells and count real stars.
I wouldn’t change things, but I also want to write. The conundrum! Once again, Toni Morrison speaks to me:
Time is the problem, not the activities. Apparently it’s a facility that I have to tune out the chaos and routine events if I’m thinking about the writing. I never have had sustained time to write, long periods or a week away to do anything—I never had that. So I would always write under conditions that probably are unbearable when people think of how one writes. I never applied to go to those wonderful artist retreats. My wish sometimes was that if someone would just take care of the children for a little while, then I wouldn't have to go any place: I could just stay where I was.
I guess in my case, you could say that someone is taking care of the grandchildren for a little while, while I remain right in the center of my life, with a dozen or more extra hours each week for the next three weeks, all for my novel. Plenty of time to finish the whole dumb thing.
As I work, I am, as I’ve said, drenched in thoughts of place. Everywhere I look, signs of it: houses on stilts, many recently rebuilt or still under construction in the wake of Hurricane Michael’s destruction here in 2018. The Forgotten Coast and the people here were changed by that hurricane, which was reportedly the fiercest storm to hit Florida in eighty years and the fourth most powerful ever to strike in the contiguous United States in terms of wind speed. It was also the most intense U.S. hurricane on record to strike in the month of October. And it came from nowhere. It grew from a badly organized Sunday morning system of rain clouds “meandering off the east coast of the Yucatan peninsula,” according to the National Hurricane Center, into a tropical storm by Sunday night. Then it tore across the Gulf of Mexico and ballooned from a category two hurricane to category four in just hours on Tuesday night. Breathtaking and record setting. So horrific was the storm damage and its aftermath that there, in fact, will never be another Hurricane Michael. That’s because at the end of each season, the National Hurricane Center removes and replaces the names of any particularly deadly or costly storms. The name Michael was retired at the end of 2018.
But Michael is still very much alive here on the Forgotten Coast. In fact, Michael is a main character in the story of this place now. Perhaps he will be for decades to come. You cannot have a conversation with anyone here and not hear the name Michael—before Michael, after Michael, because of Michael, when Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael. It’s so personal. And of course we see Michael everywhere too, in the trees—those that survived—with their branches shorn off except for those strange pom-pom tops, in the empty boat slips and the abandoned homes with still-boarded up windows, in the endless construction vehicles that rumble down Highway 98, and perhaps most of all in the many large, showy beach homes and newer condo projects being built by developers who swooped in when regular people couldn’t afford to rebuild. Recognizing this relationship between events and places is helping me as I build the world of my novel and try to bring it to life in a way that could make Dorothy Allison drunk.
Later in this newsletter, in the Spark section, you will find a detailed and unconventional writing exercise to help you think about and work with the power of place in your own stories, essays, and books. An exercise to help you, too, make Dorothy Allison (and your own readers) drunk on place. I offer that exercise and the rest of this edition of the monthly Writing in the Dark newsletter with love and gratitude—and a quick reminder of format:
1. Lighting the Craft: What I am learning lately about craft, and my musings about it + any relevant resources.
2. Fuel: What I’m reading, which will include books, essays, poems, other.
3. Spark: A writing exercise for you to work on if you like.
4. Fire & Smoke: Short recap of my own writing life, including the ups, downs, joys, challenges, breakthroughs, and setbacks. And whatever else seems urgent and necessary in a given month.
With love,
Jeannine
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