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.

The Gift of Belonging

Great Plains and Western literature (and I) lost a wonderful friend last March. Dr. Arthur Huseboe contributed to so much in the lives of so many that I can't begin to detail his life. I came to know him while I was a student at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, SD, in the early 1980s, where he was my literature and creative writing professor. Dr. Huseboe was the first person to open my eyes to regional literature, specifically literature of the West and Great Plains of America, through his work as my teacher and through the Center for Western Studies at Augustana. He's the one who taught me about the significance of place in a writer's voice and work. Because of Dr. H, I think of myself as a regional writer.

Dr. Huseboe also took me seriously as a novelist, God bless him. He spent countless hours reading my first attempts at poetry, short stories and novels and encouraged me to keep trying. He introduced me to the Western Literature Association, whose members surely feel the great loss of their former President. He helped me to write my first scholarly paper on a South Dakota author, Herbert Krause, and encouraged me to present it at a WLA conference in Idaho. Dr. H also provided one of my favorite quotes about mentoring. "No one was ever corrected into perfection."

Fortunately, after some years away, I reconnected with him a few months before he died. His last words to me were of affection and encouragement and I will always thank him for that. So there it is. When I sit down to write, I often think of him. When I reflect on the Great Plains and the West as my home, I realize that he is the one who gave this vagabond a sense of regional belonging.

Thanks to my dear mentor, Dr. Arthur Huseboe, whom I deeply miss, for teaching me that I'm in a good place, writing it down, right here.

Writing it Then

I may be the world's most delinquent blogger, but I have been writing. This new story is requiring a great deal of research. Thanks to the Internet, that process is sometimes too enjoyable.
In my online and "inbooks" research, I've been in places as specific as London...Calais...Berlin and Steinhoering Germany and last, but not least, the Republican River valley in Franklin County, Nebraska. The only one of those places I have ever actually visited was that part of Nebraska, where my parents grew up and my grandparents lived as I was a child. (The photo at left is of my Grandpa Henry Feess, holding me in front of the Franklin County Courthouse.) Among those different and distant places are also different times...1900-1960s, with the narrator telling the story in 1968.

My current novel was in process when I had the pleasure of reading Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. It is a fascinating and vivid retelling of the story of Thomas Cromwell, the first Earl of Essex during the reign of Henry VII. She reveals some of the challenges of research, which took her five years, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
 
"To avoid contradicting history, she created a card catalogue, organized alphabetically by character. Each card contained notes locating a particular historical figure—such as protagonist Thomas Cromwell, Henry's adviser—on relevant dates.

'You really need to know, where is the Duke of Suffolk at the moment? You can't have him in London if he's supposed to be somewhere else,' she says." (1)

Checking facts provides a sturdy framework for plot and character. Thorough research might include contemporaneous fashion, household items, road and topographical maps, train schedules and bus routes, medical procedures and reading materials, to name a few. But then, there's all the rest. Of course, I'm sure Ms. Mantel would agree. Physical location in time and space is only the first part of the challenge. In my case, I'm involving my characters with actual historic figures, as she did, so I must share her scruples.

 
Characters in historical fiction may not have access to public education and may struggle with common injuries and diseases that have no cure. They may witness death as an ordinary event and find themselves caught up in historic tides, without the luxury or arrogance that time provides for interpretation. Picture a man who only listens to his radio for music and events and reads the paper primarily to develop his political views...a woman who boards a ship or a train incognito, instead of going through a security check and body pat-down at the airport...someone who isn't traceable with a number on a cell phone or a or credit or debit card, so he or she could get lost and found repeatedly, even reinventing himself or herself, at will.

This lovely ordeal of maybes and maybe nots, this process of writing takes time and mental immersion. It's exciting and will not be rushed. But it's a marvelous moment when the characters begin to speak in their own language, in their own time, even talking back when you try to make them do something they can't fathom from their time and place. Then the real education and fun begin for this writer.

Thanks to Hilary Mantel, I have a new respect for authors of quality historical fiction, their processes and results. Now I just may be addicted, as well, to writing it there and then.


(1) "How to Write a Great Novel," Wall Street Journal Friday, November 13, 2009. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703740004574513463106012106.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_lifestyle
(2) This image is of book cover, found on Wikipedia and Amazon.com, and the copyright for it is most likely owned either by the artist who created the cover or the publisher of the book. It is believed that the use of low-resolution images of book covers to illustrate an article discussing the book in question qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. This is my sole intention in uploading the image.

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.