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.

Gorgeous picture of Madison from the other side of the river captured at a friend’s equally gorgeous wedding this weekend

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.

Don’t you love a book with a map?

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.

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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.

My friend, Katy’s, pug, Bazbo

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.

1. 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.

2. See exhibit 1, our friends in town who label themselves the Gays Against Fun.