Port William, Yoknapatawpha County, Crosby, St. Mary Mead and…Lanier?
Port William, Yoknapatawpha County, Crosby, St. Mary Mead and…Lanier?
Loving a place and writing a place
Wendell Berry has Port William. Faulker had Yoknapatawpha County. Elizabeth Strout has Crosby, Maine. Agatha Christie had St. Mary Mead (also, aren’t English village names the best?). I’ve got Lanier, which is the name I’ve given to the fictional version of Madison. My young adult novel—FAIR GAME—is set in Lanier.1 Madisonians should recognize the riverfront and Clifty Falls and, yes, Hong Kong Kitchen. The short story collection I’ve been working on is also set in Lanier, as well as the new project I started last week.
Why do some writers create fictional places and then return to them over and over again in their stories? Partly because it’s easier. Making up entire people and then also things that happen to them and conversations they have all takes a lot of brain power. If you can spare yourself the effort of also making up the whole world they inhabit, that’s a blessing. So when you want a character to be walking down a street, it’s generally a lot easier to put them on a street you actually know.
That’s part of it, but it also has to do with what novelist Luis Alberto Urrea said when I asked him how he kept faith in the ten years between his first publication (a story in an anthology edited by Urula K. Le Guin) and his next publication. He said he kept faith for the people whose stories he wanted to tell—“All the people were so precious to me, but they were invisible.” Or I keep writing Madison because of what Elizabeth Strout said—“Believe you are the only person in the world who can tell this story.” Or it has to do with this quote from Joan Didion:
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his [or her] own image.
Maybe it has to do with my weakness as a writer—I can’t imagine writing a place I don’t know intimately. I can’t imagine writing that isn’t partly about me trying to do what Didion describes above—shape a place, render it, and love it radically. I don’t want to live somewhere I don’t love and part of how I learn to love a place is by writing it. I write to get to the bottom of a lot of things, including the nature of place and community.
A lot of the writers who are famous for their fictional places are also writers of rural places. Small villages or Southern counties. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. People who write about big cities are also writing a place, but we tend not to label them as such as often. New York stories get to be seen as universal stories in a way Southern stories do not and that’s fine.
I also think a lot of the famous literary places are rural because those writers had a chip on their shoulder they were trying to work out. If you’re not from a small town, you might be tempted to believe it’s a shallow place. You might assume that the stories there aren’t as deep and complicated. Small town, small passions.
If you’ve lived in a small place, you know how far from the truth that is. It’s more like taking all the regular human feelings and drama and packing it into a contained space, increasing its density until people practically explode with intensity and longing. Small, but deep.
I think writers like Faulkner and Berry are writing against those assumptions. They’re trying to show the world that these small places have value, too. I get it. I’m right there with them. In a world where we treat each other with sweeping generalizations, I’m happy to be writing into the nuances. In FAIR GAME, Dot’s problem isn’t that she’s ostracized because she’s gay, which is the narrative a lot of people would expect from a small town. It’s that she doesn’t fit in with the particular type of gay girls at her high school, because even in a small town, not all gay people are the same.2
Everywhere I go these days in Madison, people are likely to say something to me about my book. “Congrats on your new book!” or “I’ve got your book, but I haven’t read it yet.” I don’t know what it’s like for writers who live in other sorts of places. But here in Madison, I live in the middle of my own fan club and, I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty awesome.
When I did a call-out for people to help with my book launch, about half the folks who signed up were neighbors and friends. The first person (as far as I know) to get a copy of my book was my beautiful sister, but after that, it’s a lot of folks around town.
It’s true that when you live in a small town, there isn’t a big community of fellow writers. Because I don’t live in New York or L.A. or Chicago, I don’t get to go to the parties with all the important publishing people. I’ll always be an outsider in those circles. But when I do step out into the world as a writer, I always feel like I’m stepping out with a small army of Madisonians who have my back.
If you live in a place like that, why wouldn’t you want to write about it? Why wouldn’t you want to broadcast that love to the entire world? Why wouldn’t you want your friends and neighbors and your favorite barista and your librarian all to recognize themselves in your words? I don’t know if I always believe I’m the only person in the world who can tell these stories, but I do believe they’re the only stories I want to tell.
If you haven’t ordered a copy of FAIR GAME yet, what are you waiting for? All the cool pugs are doing it. Also be sure to ask your local library to order a copy for their shelves.
And here’s all your FAIR GAME bookish events coming up.
Tuesday, August 15, 5:30 - 6:15, Madison Public Library. Girls vs. Boys: Exploring Gender and Athletic Performance. Follow-up reception and book signing at Red Roaster.
Monday, August 21, 7:00, Joseph-Beth Booksellers-Rookwood. Cincinnati.
Saturday, September 16, Village Lights Bookstore (more details to come and Village Lights will also have a few copies to buy in-store).
Saturday, October 21, Kentucky Book Festival, Joseph-Beth Booksellers-Lexington.
Maybe no one’s noticed or maybe just not bothered to point it out, but on the back cover copy, it describes the story as taking place in Madison, while inside, they’re in Lanier. One of those mistakes that slips past when you’re doing this on your own. Oops.
See exhibit 1, our friends in town who label themselves the Gays Against Fun.
If I used anything other than "like"/thumbs, I'd use a heart about how I felt about your post.
I treasure Wendell Berry’s work and have since I was a kid who read The Unsettling of America. One of my favorite scenes in his Port Williams series was when the river was flooding and people were worried about two old bachelors who lived in an area prone to flooding, so they got together a rescue team and fed out rope attached to boat in the flood to get near enough to the old men to find out if they were safe. “Are you okay, “ they shouted into the storm. During a lull, they heard the old men shout back. “We’re okay.”
And how about Garrison Keillor and Lake Wobegone? Or is it too soon?
I am also a fan of William Least Heat Moon, and his Prairyerth: A Deep Map, where he explores intimately and in great detail a small Midwest county. It doesn’t get more local than that.
I could write volumes about my little town, er, village. It’s got a feisty history. Back in the late ‘40s, the state legislature passed a law that allowed slot machines and hard liquor sales if a place had 125 residents and incorporated as a city, so they incorporated our “city.” Since we are ten miles off the main (and realistically, the only) north south road in the state, a little settlement at the junction of our road and the the north south highway thought they deserved a shot a slot machines and liquor sales to meet the needs of the traveling public. In some dark, smoke-filled room somewhere, a plan was hatched to annex the little settlement to our “city” via a ten mile long, one foot wide easement. (I am told the easement is still in effect.) The arrangement was even noted nationally by Life Magazine in the early ‘50s.
I also know the story of how a Model T Ford pickup ended up in our river (it’s still there), about the soft coal seam early residents used for home heating, and the location of the remains an ancient potato storage cellar back when our valley grew produce for gold rush miners. I know where a family and their goats lived in a hand dug cave and no one knew who they were other than as the goat people.
The Scottish family who settled the homestead where my house stands had several sons who left home during the Great Depression to find work. One son joined the Army Air Corps. Another went to work for Morrison-Knudsen, a locally based construction company that did projects around the world, including Hoover Dam. The son who worked for MK was sent to Wake Island to help build an airfield as part of a government contract to build airbases on American possessions in the Pacific. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked Wake Island and the 900 civilian employees of MK helped the US Marines defend the island until it was finally invaded. Most of the men spent the rest of the war in pow camps and the son on Wake Island survived the war. The brother in the Army Air Corps died and is buried in the Philippines.
And we have a great literary tradition around here. Tara Westover grew up in eastern Idaho, Vardis Fisher was the Cormac McCarthy of the ‘30s to the ‘60s. Kim Barnes from northern Idaho continues to make us proud with her novels and non-fiction memoirs. And Ernest Hemingway is buried in Ketchum, Idaho, where he killed himself.
And until he died a few years ago, Paul Revere of Paul Revere and the Raiders, lived five miles down the road from me.
Don’t tell me big cities are the places where all the interesting things happen, not when I live in a town one foot wide and ten miles long.