It has been 13 months since Ecotone: Writing about Place began collecting essays on places, people and the ideas that make them real. Has consciously writing this way changed your thinking? Were there "Aha!" moments when you read, or when you wrote, something? (P.)
[Fragments from Floyd] ...I'm not sure any of us could put our fingers accurately on what it is that binds us together loosely as a community of writers and readers. Maybe, in another year, we'll better understand our connectedness to place and to each other. I can say, there is something here that warrants digging deeper.
[TheCassandraPages] The Ecotone feels tangible because it is where I have encounterd real people who inhabit real places and imagine others, and it's a place where we have hashed out a new form of essay-writing in the blogosphere...
[Feathers of Hope (Pica)] Going somewhere SPECIAL triggered in me the impulse to explore place, but what keeps me looking, and sketching, and writing is the mundane, the far more prosaic space around me now...
[Hoarded Ordinaries] So, why blog about place--why does place matter? For me there's this constant desire to feel at home in a place, to feel at home wherever I find myself by noticing, recording, and remembering tiny details as they manifest themselves...
[Via Negativa] More than once, in the six months since I started blogging, I've written something quite by accident that seemed to comport with the current Ecotone topic - though until last month, I refrained from going so far as to actually enter a link here. In response to the above questions: for me, if I didn't regularly experience "Aha!" moments, I wouldn't bother to write - about anything. Place usually creeps in without my noticing.
[alembic] About two years ago, I was reading The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. For those who know his work, it comes as no news that SebaldĄ¯s approach to writing has much in common with the best of blog writing about place. ItĄ¯s not just that his seemingly autobiographical narrator wonders through the most amazing landscapes in England, Europe, or China, or other parts of Asia. ItĄ¯s also how he makes history itself into a landscape in which place is a map.
[London and the North] A strange thing happened to me once at the end of a holiday in Madeira. It had been a good holiday, great scenery, air and food. As the plane started to take off I started to weep, bucketfulls. Paris, who was not able to be sitting next to me was alarmed. I guess other passengers must have thought I was a bit mad or something. After a while, things fell into place.
Not a blogger per se, I saw the Ecotone last year as an opportunity to do something I really needed to do, write, and a chance to do a little creative thinking within a loose structure. I was greatly flattered to be invited to share. What I didn't expect was that the others here would write so spectacularly well, and from so many creative perspectives! What I have read is more satisfying than the writing, and I can only say ... thanks.
P.
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