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?

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• 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

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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

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Two things immediately strike me.

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 attache and rooted in this landscape, my writing starts to come out of deeper and deeper places.