A Place Between Pain and Imagination

As I enter my eighth year of chronic pain from untreatable daily migraines, I've come to wonder how it affects my ability to be creative and spiritually present in my life. Distraction is often my only defense. This may be an asset for my imagination--even when I'm too miserable to write, I can let my mind wander into fictional alternatives. But pain makes the more pleasant realities of my daily life elusive. It also can lead to separation from spiritual disciplines and the people I love.

I guess it's a Catch-22. There is a territory that I inhabit, somewhere between my often-painful physical surroundings and the landscape of imagination. I suppose everyone has such a place, rarely described but very useful in dealing with life's less pleasant moments.

So, what's the landscape in your imaginative world?

Where am I, anyway?

The question of place in writing fiction is challenging for me. It's not a simple matter of geography (GPS can answer that one in a snap) or even culture. It's a mad mix of topography, weather, flora and fauna, wilderness and civilization. It's about the people who used to be here and the ones who are present now. Their language, their assumptions and the way they live on or with the land--all of these make this place what it is now.

As a person who has wandered a great deal from place to place in my lifetime, I wonder. Can I ever belong anywhere? And even if I settle down, which I choose to believe I now have, I must admit that I carry many other places and their experiences within myself. I'm no native . . . anywhere.

Unlike my husband, who grew up in this same area where we are now settled, I have lived my life in a long, looping track of temporary environments. They have formed my impressions and tinge my interactions with the land and people here in northwest Iowa. If I see a garter snake, I can't help but think of the poisonous varieties of serpents that I dodged as a little girl in the bayou regions of southeast Texas. When I admire the daylilies in the ditches along our county road, I think back to the black-eyed Susans of Texas and the graceful columbine of Colorado. And I've changed this place to suit my memories of what home should be. There are aspen trees in my yard and some of the aforementioned columbine in my garden. No poisonous snakes, though. Thank goodness.

Realizing that we are indelibly marked by our past places and that we leave marks wherever we are . . . this is part of what it means to be a physical being in physical places over time.

So ask yourself today . . . where am I? And how have I changed this place to suit me, even as it affects me to belong to it?

In the novel I'm working on now, the main character is a lifelong wanderer like me. I'm not sure I could write about someone who lived all of her or his life in one place. That experience is a mystery to me. But maybe if I stay here long enough, I'll taste it. That sense of belonging for life. Just maybe.

On Writing, With Respect to Bill Watterson

Becoming Conscious

I'll provide just a short excerpt here, one worthy of meditation. I find that Tom Lynch's book reads a little like poetry. He slows me down and draws me into his present, his place.
"Whether I wish it or not, there is only and always engagement, only and always intimacy."
It speaks of our human unconsciousness that we feel we have discovered and must convince one another of our belonging to the particular place where we stand. How did we become so unaware?
Even more importantly, how do we awaken ourselves to what is immediate and real?

Bioregional Literature III -- The Desert

On what will certainly not be my last musings on bioregional literary criticism, I would like to offer up an interesting example. Tom Lynch, mentioned in my previous post, is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he teaches "ecocriticism and place-conscious literature." Through the Texas Tech University Press, Tom Lynch has published a volume entitled, Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. As a repeated, devoted visitor to Northern New Mexico, I look forward to reading this book. An excerpt:
“[W]hether I notice or not, the landscape suffuses my body. Unidentifiable scents enter my lungs with each breath: the mingled smells of dust, rock, juniper, turpentine bush, mountain mahogany, the heady mix of volatile oils of the creosote bush, and the ever-so-subtle odor of blue sky. Though less often articulated, all of my senses, not just vision, are engaged; the phenomena of this world circulate through me, and I through them. The landscape caresses as I pass through. . . . On my feet again, I hobble from stiffness, throw my pack on, and, leaning on my sotol stalk for balance, begin to pick my way zigzag down the long rocky slope. I am in love with this landscape. I am, indeed, a devoted xerophile.”                                   —from the introduction
For those of you like myself, who are tempted to look up xerophile and see how a person could be one...I already did. A xerophile is an organism that is adapted to conditions with a low availability of water. My longest stretch in an isolated region of the New Mexico desert was ten days and I felt an interesting sense of falling in love, a willingness to adapt to the extreme aridity, even if that sense of adaptation was primarily a keen sense of my vulnerability. It was difficult to walk anywhere without considering how far I might be from the nearest river or water source. In a larger sense, I realized the primacy of nature in that place and came face-to-face with my irrelevance to the surroundings. I was not at the center of any scheme in the desert, and it was a satisfying realization, both intellectually and spiritually.
Many have considered the westward expansion and settlement of the American frontier to have been a sort of dominion or mastery, the exertion and supremacy of human structures and energies over nature. It takes a spiritual, and even literary, humility to consider how the physical world shapes the those of us who tread on and in it. Perhaps it takes an even more profound sense of our union with and need for the earth to consider that we should tread lightly, even invisibly as we pass by.
Do we define places, or do they define us? Discuss amongst yourselves...
      photo credit: El Santuario de Chimayo, by Fermin Hernandez

Bioregional LIterature II

While recently visiting the Western Literature Association website, I noted a literary term that was new and yet familiar to me; bioregional literary criticism. Merriam-Webster defines a bioregion as "a region whose limits are naturally defined by topographic and biological features (as mountain ranges and ecosystems)." In the 1970s, Peter Berg described bioregionalism as "an environmental perspective that emphasizes action over protest, lifestyle over legislation." He later expanded the definition of a bioregion as "a geographic terrain and a terrain of consciousness." 
"A terrain of consciousness." Mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers, meadows and plains shaped (and still shape) not only our physical expansion as a nation, but also stirred (and still stir) American writers to deeper insight about the human experience. For example, Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping gave us Fingerbone, a lakeside mountain town as physical and dreamlike as any in American literature. She demonstrated with insight and precision that a literary "place" absorbs and exceeds its ecology, topography and biology.
According to the WLA site when I consulted it, Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty and Karla Armbruster are currently at work on a volume of essays on the topic of bioregional literary criticism. They propose to examine situations and writing from "community-based writing projects" to "place-based publication ventures," as well as considerations of how "post-colonialism, globalization, and environmental justice affect literature worldwide." I haven't discussed the topic or their developing project with these editors, but I look forward to their future publication.
As writers, we only approach and honor the universal when we attend to the concrete details of human experience. Through vivid, specific characters, actions and places, we create an alternative interpretation and influence of reality, whether we render it starkly, ornately, or with a touch of the fantastic. Bioregional literary criticism is another way we might explore "where we are" and "who we are" in literature and in life.
I hope that this blog becomes "fertile ground" for exploration and discussion of how fiction, poetry and essays help us read and write ourselves into a sense of where and who we are.

Bioregional Literature I

To classify a literary work as "regional" may at first glance seem to limit its scope and appeal. Some essays, novels or poetry are initially slow to generate interest beyond their "land of origin." However, readers today increasingly seek out literature that provides an experience that they would never otherwise find. Fascinating and worthy writers who record native, immigrant, minority and exile experiences increasingly capture contemporary readers' imagination.

Many readers and critics favor one or another specific "lenses" through which to interpret what they read (gender, politics and linguistics are just a few). One such lens, a personal favorite of mine, is to explore the particular nuances that resonate from a literary sense of place.

My first exposure to this particular literary lens came while I was an English student at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, SD. Dr. Arthur Huseboe, who established the Center for Western Studies there, dedicated much of his scholarship to the culture and literature of the Great Plains and the West, with special scholarly attention to authors Frederick Manfred and Herbert Krause.

I learned more about Great Plains and Western regionalism while attending a Western Literature Association conference in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in October of 1989. By that time, I had lived across a broad swath of the region mockingly dubbed "The Great American Desert"--from Texas to Minnesota, and Colorado to Iowa. The idea of the American Plains and West as fertile ground for literature led me to focus on it, as well as creative writing, in my Master's degree studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. As a reader, the "meanings" of this particular region still fascinate me. The romance of literary participation in this regional tradition fires my own fiction writing.

Being somewhere specific

A childhood lived out in several different states gave me few roots but many branches. My family-in-motion nurtured me with colorful and diverse experiences of Great Plains and Western American life. As an observer, I gained a useful sense of disconnection that persists to this day--a desire to write myself into being, through the regional, eccentric characters and stories that form my imagination.

Does a sense of place really matter?

Absolutely.

Where are you and where have you been? Tell me this, then tell me who you are and I will believe your story.