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?
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
First, it seems as if our love of and connection to place is informed by childhood experiences. I am wondering why that is. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that as children we are very connected to the places where we live. If we grew up in rural environments, or out of doors at all, we will have an innate sense of place, the rhythms of the landscape, the animals and plants that live there, the effect of weather and seasons on us. At some point it seems that we "get eyes" or what Fred calls "a lens" and we are able to dissociate from the landscape. This allows us to then write about it becasue we can finally "see" it as seperate from ourselves. The fish can tell you nothing about the water, but it knows everything about it intuitively.
And that leads to my second point. So much of this writing touches on how we became aware of "place" as a concept by moving away from the places where we were born. Only one or two of the ten entries are from people who have a deep and constant connection to the place they live in now. I doubt if any of us have stayed in one spot for our entire lives. The result of this is a form of dissonance that in hearing it, we note immediately how our current place is different from the places in which we grew up. For me certainly, this perspective of the exile has informed much of my writing about place because I can see things from "above" and I don't have to work so hard to get perspective on the subjects of my writing.
I have noticed however, in the 2 years since I have been keeping [Bowen Island Journal] that my writing has moved from something of an "objective" perspective to a much deeper narrative of place. At one time the salmonberries made a good subject to write about. Now it is more about my relationship to them that matters. As I become more and more attached and rooted in this landscape, my writing starts to come out of deeper and deeper places. -- Chris
I think childhood experience is crucial, in some way, to a sense of place. I've been spending time in Maine at my sister's with my cousin who is developing a curriculum for Chinese 8th-graders that focuses on sustainability. Their first lesson, the first module, is called "Sense of Place." She has been using some of the ideas developed by David Driskell of Unicef (author of Growing Up in Cities) on place. In workshops he asks people to remember a place from their childhood. Almost never does this turn out to be a playground, a schoolroom, or anything remotely connected with learning, so his point is that we need to redesign schools so children feel safe and rooted there. By extension, if the entire environment of a child is not conducive to sense of place, it raises serious issues about the child's ability to fulfill his or her potential.
I'm very excited to be finding out about this just as the wiki seems to be entering orbit... -- Alison
Your second point is well taken, as well, Chris. As I think back over the past two weeks in a writing workshop (as a student) surveying the literature of Appalachia, I'm impressed by how many poets and writers live in other parts of the country and the world now, but write with passion about their home's hills and hollers and homefolk back in Tennessee or Virginia. Certainly, moving away does offer the chance to 'rise above your raisin', in that it allows one to see familiar places from the vantage point of an outsider, seeing it again, for the first time. -- Fred
I was really moved by the posts; what a wonderful launch for this idea! Chris, I think you make some excellent points. I didn't think about that whole concept of "home" or being shaped by a landscape until I moved from it. People also push us into examining our identity and sense of place. Like Traveler Trish, I married into a Middle Eastern family. They immigrated here in the 1940's and became a mirror for examining my own many-generational background and questioning all sorts of things I'd always taken for granted. They also had an entirely different sense of place and way of carrying it with them wherever they went that was fascinating to me. --Beth
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