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.

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.