Over there...

This Blogspot site has served me well, but from now on, I will only update this transferred and ongoing blog at klynwurth.wordpress.com. See you there!

At Home in the Wild, Wild West

photo courtesy of Charles Staab

One of my all-time favorite novels is Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. I've watched this author with great interest since I trekked to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, to attend the Western Literature Association Conference in 1989. Having grown up in Colorado, along the front range of the Rocky Mountains, I found the idea of a "western" point of view great with potential.

While blogging around last evening, I had the happy accident of finding the site for the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest. There I found this essay by Robinson, "My Western Roots." This statement snagged my attention:

• But I think it was in fact peculiarly western to feel no tie of particularity to any one past or history, to experience that much underrated thing called deracination, the meditative, free appreciation of whatever comes under one's eye, without any need to make such tedious judgments as "mine" and "not mine." 

Robinson examines how society, as it always will, "precludes and forecloses the inherent domesticity, " the "loveliness and graciousness" to be found in a domestic culture, where only the barest of amenities draw people close together, into housekeeping.

• At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental. It is the sad tendency of domesticity—as of piety—to contract, and of grace to decay into rigor, and peace into tedium. Still it should be clear why I find the Homestead Act all in all the most poetical piece of legislation since Deuteronomy, which it resembles.

We wonder with Robinson whether or not the West and its regional spirit has any place in modern consciousness and society as a whole.

• I think it is fair to say that the West has lost its place in the national imagination, because by some sad evolution, the idea of human nature has become the opposite of what it was when the myth of the West began, and now people who are less shaped and constrained by society are assumed to be disabled and dangerous. This is bad news for the national psyche, a fearful and anti-democratic idea, which threatens to close down change. I think it would be a positively good thing for the West to assert itself in the most interesting terms, so that the whole country must hear, and be reanimated by dreams and passions it has too casually put aside and too readily forgotten.

Marilynne Robinson challenges her readers to consider the complexities of our individual, regional and national identities. In this essay, she also explains how her experience and education in Idaho is evident in her novel, Housekeeping, an elegant and deceptively simple story that echoes beyond regions to consider what it means to be human, at home.

An Authentic Place in History: More Thoughts on Writing it Then

Writing (historical) fiction--any fiction that isn't in the "now" -- complicates the attempt to connect with the cultures, land and languages of specific locations. As I currently write about European cities and villages in the early to mid-20th century, I encounter myriad uncertainties about occupancy, politics, languages and loyalties, through time.

In my American experience, I assume a relatively stable history--at least for the last two hundred years or so. After squelching the first people on this land we call "America" (one branch of my family tree, now untraceable), our State has occupied much of the same area, over time, with a few additions, here and there. 

So what or where is "there?"

"There" can be a shibboleth, a geographical feature, a style of architecture or a spice in food. It can be a pattern of emigration or the burden of political or religious persecution, tribal or global. It can be an experience of isolation or a hectic trampling under a thundering new civilization. I can be a fossil or a gigabyte. It can be general, but particularly in fiction, it is always personal.

Writing about history and attempting to capture an authentic sense of place can be risky and confusing. Exhilarating, if it works. Embarrassing, if it doesn't. Nobody wants to be caught with literary or historical "foot in mouth" by a sin of omission--a failure to steep the writing in more than just a "Wiki" or "Google" glance at the people and places we depict. On the other hand, the hyper-availability of information at our fingertips can glut and stall a writer's mind.

So we try to find a middle ground. As the late Tony Judt stated in his last work, Thinking the Twentieth Century, in conversations with Timothy Snyder, "The truth of authenticity is different from the truth of honesty. To be authentic is to live as one wishes others to live; to be honest is to admit that this is impossible." As novelists, we try to be authentic, but must admit that we live in a different time or place than what we depict. Imagination is not license and history is not a shackle, but we owe it to our readers to do our best, to be true to both.

She Says it Well...

Today I will be uncharacteristically brief. On Beyond the Margins' web site, Sarah McCoy eloquently testifies to "The Significance of Settings" in writing. (Not place settings, of course, but this is cheesecake, after all.)I hope you will read and appreciate her thoughts, as I have and as I do. Thanks, Sarah.

Settling In

It's a personal best. I've now lived at the same address for five and a half years.  I know that necessities, moves and changes can surprise a person and I have no exemption from life's disasters...nor do I want to imply a moral value to staying or leaving. I can only say that I'm glad to be where I am and I've learned a thing or two by staying here.

From my husband, I've learned from which direction the wind usually brings rain, where the falling, blowing snow will probably drift, as well as the related art of placing snow fences. I've watched potential tornado clouds flow like dark waters over my head, then felt relief because something bad didn't just happen to me, my neighbors or the crops in their fields. We all watch with anticipation for the first signs of the corn spiking, tasseling and firing and the soybean leaves drying yellow. Harvest is the best time, a culmination of a year's work and risk.

We built a house and we're planting trees and gardens (I use "we" inclusively, although I must give full credit to my husband for being the muscles of the operation.) I've learned exactly how not to cover tea roses in the winter if I want them to survive in this climate. I recognize a rhythm in the turn of constellations, the rising and setting of the sun and moon, the solstices and seasons. We're far enough from city lights to spot eclipses, meteor showers and even the occasional aurora borealis.

Around here, people welcome strangers inside if the weather's bad and it's not safe to travel. When two pickups idle in the middle of the street for the drivers to converse, you turn into the alley to get around them; you definitely don't honk. I've learned to avoid gossip but also to be amused by whatever rumor is going around about me. When I took a chance to play my guitar at a local gathering, they made me feel very talented and appreciated. You can't beat that.

Here's the irony. If any of my neighbors or people in town were to read this, they could, by rights, laugh me out of the county for claiming to be settled. They've lived here all their lives. Their great-grandparents are buried in that cemetery west of here. They model how to enjoy and care for other people, how not to get snooty when somebody offends because that person probably lives near you and you'll face him or her again.

Even the intention of staying affects everything about my life. Not only am I happy to take off my traveling shoes, but my extended family have "a place to come home to" in the midst of their own moves and changes. Maybe that makes them feel a little more steady, a little more recognized and a little stronger in their mobile day-to-day lives.

Staying affects my writing, providing a fulcrum for respecting and responding to other cultures, views and characters. It's easier to recognize what and where I'm not, when I take time to consider what and where I am. That brings me a little closer to the what, where and whom of every person I relate to, whether in fiction or in flesh. This includes the driver who pulled out in front of me on the 55 mph county highway and made me hit my brakes. It's not a problem, because we're both from around here. In fact, I'm fairly certain that he's the local funeral home director, so I did well to leave him with a good impression.