DiscussionJune15Topic

This page is for discussion of the June 15 biweekly topic: "How did you start thinking about 'place", and why did you start writing (or blogging) about it?"

When you read the essays offered in this first-ever Ecotone blog group topic, do you get a sense of recurrent themes, forces, needs, passions or purposes in our relationships with place? If part of our purpose in these pages is to better understand this type of writing, this type of thinking... what could we extract from these essays, taken together, that would allow us to say "This is what drives writers about place", or "this is their destination"? What stands out in your mind when you read these pieces?

• In our times, sense of place is elusive, a longing-for rather than a posession. We pay a price for our mobility, our rootlessness. Few have a 'homeplace' to go back to, or even the pictures that Beth can hold in her hands and say "this is, or was, my place". We create a sense of place and attach it to our present-day surroundings as a way of creating identity. Perhaps this is central: we exist in context of place, take from it our notions of who we are. FF

• The traveling 'outsiders' point of view on space is interesting... a sort of commensalism where the traveler borrows from the 'place-ness' experienced vicariously in unfamiliar communities. FF

What strikes me when reading these pieces is that there doesn't seem to be any connection between a sense of place and a sense of rootedness. Some of us are strongly rooted, others of us are given to peregrinations, yet we all write with a strong awareness of place. Rather, it's as though there's a faculty we've all developed to a good degree, call it geographical curiosity or geographical imagination. --Allan