On Writing Place

thoughts on the art of magnification, with assists from Beth Castrodale, Vincenzo Latronico, Geraldine Brooks, and others

San Francisco Botanical Garden, Beth Kephart

When I remember the books I’ve written, I call them by their names. El Salvador. Chanticleer. Juarez. Seville. Berlin. Florence. The Jersey Shore. The Adirondacks. McClure. Philadelphia. Philadelphia, again. It’s the where of my books that bring my stories back to me. The when within the where.

I see the coffee farms on the volcanic earth before I reconstruct the family lore. (Still Love in Strange Places)

I see the cortijo and its fighting bulls before I hear the gypsy song. (Small Damages)

I see the graffiti walls and concertina wire before I worry for the boy who will dare to ride a flimsy zipline to freedom. (Going Over)

I see the drowned kitchens and ruined cars in the flooded River Arno before I remember the mud angels. (One Thing Stolen)

I see the beach after the storm before I can save the castaways. (This Is the Story of You)

I see the Fleisher yarn factory at 26th and Reed before I catch, in my imagination, all those flecks of yarn. (Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story)

Stories are contained, and place, most often, contains them. All that action and angst has to unfold somewhere, and so we writers consult our maps, draw up our floor plans, pave the roads, paper the walls, weed the gardens, identify the edges. It all seems so obvious—to write of place is to lean on all our senses—but every time I’ve set out to write a world (a house, a garden, a city), I’ve found myself starting all over again—mystified by the how of place, amazed when (if!) I’ve finally found my way.

We traveled to the west coast two weeks ago. I took three books along. An utterly enjoyable ghost story (The Inhabitants by Beth Castrodale), a bracing exegesis of existential despair (Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico [thank you, Trey Popp, for the recommendation]), and a memoir of grief (Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks). I read for the stories—certainly, I did. But I also read to be instructed, again, in the making of place on the page.

Castrodale, a writer (I’m beginning to think) who can do it all, situates her story about a portrait artist in and around an old Victorian house that seems, as the pages turn, to have a mind of its own—or to have, at the very least, carried forward the mind of its designer. Castrodale announces the centrality of the house from the very start, in a note that begins chapter one:

With its gabled and turreted roof, bay windows, and patterned shingles, Farleigh House appears from the outside to be quite the ordinary Victorian. Certain features of its interior, however, push back against the typical tastes and conventions of that time, just as the home’s architect and original owner, Nathaniel Farleigh (1809-1881), was known to have done with his other designs and constructions. Some have found these features disquieting.

As the story unfolds, Castrodale trains her eye (our eyes) on the home’s details, animating the inanimate with a sure, persuasive hand. This house is more than the sum of its many delineated parts. It is also nearly human. Plausibly mendacious. Potent.

In the living room and dining room, [the mantels and pillars] were carved with faces of the sleeping or the dead—not cherubs or gods but mere mortals, it seemed, with jowls, stitched brows, and bags beneath their closed eyes.

Architecture (place) as activated, then, as horror, as suspense. The literal features of a house—the heights of windows, the proportions of rooms, the slant of ceilings—as plot. Place is no mere backdrop for Castrodale, in The Inhabitants. It is the cause, it is the effect, it is the story.

Perfection, written, according to the author, as “a tribute to Things: A Story of the Sixties, by George Perec,” is, in fact, a story about things—things collected, things arranged, things photographed, things shared, things pursued, things envied. Place, in this book, is adjective and noun, color and make, style and sensibility, curation. Place is mood and tone, gloss and ennui, a character more intimately drawn than the two lovers and co-workers (Tom and Anna) who emerge as a mostly undifferentiated (by the storyteller) “they.”

The apartment’s interior:

Sunlight floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-colored floorboards, and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face down on the seat. The red of that magazine’s cover, the plant’s brilliant green, the petrol blue of the upholstery, and the pale ochre floor stand out against the white walls, their chalky tone picked up again in the pale rug that just creeps into the frame.

Berlin:

They could spend hours roaming the narrow cobbled streets of Schillerkiez, or the linden-lined squares of the grander end of Mitte, marveling at every little detail: the jungles of tropical plants behind the windows, the geometric patterns of the flagstone pavement. They were fascinated by the contrast between the recently renovated buildings and those still bearing the shabbiness of the former East—the crumbling or graffitied stucco, the boarded-up windows.

Latronico writes place by dissecting place, by pausing before each noun and thinking, almost out loud, What else? Then pausing again: What more? He writes as a camera sees—with such tremendous particularity that the final effect is (on purpose) chilling. Things on the platter of perception. Things as character, philosophy, instruction.

In Memorial Days, Brooks has come to Flinders Island, off the coast of Australia, to do “the unfinished work of grieving” the loss of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz. From this barely populated outpost, Brooks remembers the man she loved, imagines who she might have been had the two never met, and leans toward what her living has become. Geology, biology, botany—the names and similes of rocks and shells and fish—are the tools of her place seeing, and place writing:

The dunes eventually give way to upthrusting granite, the sand replaced by rock shelves and pools. Cuttlefish skeletons have been blown into crevices. Some are a foot long, abraded by the wind to resemble the contours of topographical models. A shiny curve like a draftsman’s spline catches my eye. It is the edge of a perfect abalone shell. When I lift it out of the sand it glows in ripples, iridescent pinks and greens.

Text books inform her understanding, and ours:

Porphyritic granite. Coarse gravels. Silica-rich soils. Folded sedimentary sequences. Scattered, scoured angular blocks of siltstone, honeycombed by wind and sea. Large K-feldspar phenocrysts. Basalt xenoliths. The Blue Tier batholith, Upper Devonian period.

As Brooks remembers and lives, remembers and lives, we come to understand that she is relearning the world by naming the world. The landscape of widowhood is brand new. Brooks needs a compass; she must find a way. Here is the earth. Here is the sky. Here is the wombat. Here is the next breath, taken.

Reading Castrodale, Latronico, and Brooks, I began to think about fine place writing as a form of magnification—the animations of architecture, the particularization of things, the naming of the world to take comfort from the world, in these cases. But also place as magnified by weather (see The Last Whaler, Cynthia Reeves), place as magnified by throng and jam (see the courtroom scenes in A Dangerous Idea, Debbie Levy), place as magnified by insulation and quarantine (see Scribe, Alyson Hagy), place as magnified by secrets (see The Safekeep, Yael Van Der Wouden). And oh, I could go on.

The point is: Intensifications. Amplifications. Venerations. Place not as stage but as theater.

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My first book on the writing of memoir, Handling the Truth, won a Books for a Better Life Award shortly after its publication in 2013. I’ve continued to write books about the making of true stories ever since, working with my husband to create workbooks, prompt-rich books, and suggested approaches to the page. A guide to those resources, along with a link to my essay collection You Are Not Vanished Here (illustrated by William Sulit) can be found here.

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My new novel, Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, is available wherever books are sold.

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Join me for a Cleaver master class, “Transcending the Tumult: Write Right Now,” July 27, registration here.

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Join me for an in-person writing workshop in September, through Maine Media.