The Importance of Place

Authors often speak on the importance of place in writing. It’s quite true. What better means of writing than through your emotional roots connecting to physical places. Take your readers to the where, and the why and who and what and when might fall into place for them in a way you’d hoped. The often intangible places are just as important. Writing about Appalachia, for example – writing as an Appalachian – feels different with each telling. Nevertheless, these stories are centered, obviously or subtly, with a specific cultural backdrop in mind. Remove that, or insufficiently allow it in as a character of importance, and something vital is missing.  
But as a writer you know this, don’t you? And like myself, you are constantly trying to do it right.

Since we know what to do and have taken up the challenge of striving to make it work, I’d like to take these moments to celebrate the joys and benefits of place-specific writing.

About half of my work in poetry is obviously rooted in physical place. Another portion implies a relation with place, another portion floats about in the mostly intangible locations that fascinate me. Poetry encourages me reach back into my experience as a human being and re-picture emotional events. Some are from my earliest memories, some from last week. Some are life changing moments, some are beautifully mundane.

Since so many of these poems are framed in location, the more I write the more reminders I plant where I dwell. When on a walk, or a drive, I am reminded along the way of my own narrative. These moments serve a few purposes: to keep me rooted in my past, to lead me to new thinking, and to remind me to keep writing. Keep writing. Keep writing.

Perhaps I’ll think again on how much I learned about myself and my family meditating on the scant remains of my grandfather’s cabin. Or on the Paw Paw trees my other grandfather planted. Or how tiny the alley along the side of the house I grew up in feels these days. When I see these places my mind rushes back to the emotional wrestling required for fashioning those poems. That place resulted in a poem, I’ll remember. That place feels different to me now. It is forever with me, no longer some fractured and nearly lost memory.

That awareness, that heightened sensitivity you learn for letting place jostle your memories, opens an endless well of matter. We simply have to notice connections. Always, you came from somewhere to be there, stayed awhile, and traveled elsewhere. Each place you rested deserves attention.    

After a while, these spots along our mental and physical map accumulate and we are hopefully reminded of what Silas House encourages us to believe and say about ourselves - I am a writer. If you doubt that, when the hesitancy creeps in, or you feel too emptied to put pen to paper, remember you have place to lean on. That Kudzu covered spot there along the side of the road, that “sitting spot” along the creek of your youth, that cemetery full of your past and future, or that special table in that restaurant where you fell in love, proves you have something to say.