writing and place

I am avowed homebody.   I've only lived a few places in my life--the the neatly groomed trailer park I was born in, a small house in a town neighboring a mid-sized city, a slightly larger house in the boonies outside that same city, briefly in a dorm in Wilmington, NC, a tiny studio apartment in the Lincoln Park neighborhood during grad school, a few months in an gloriously large apartment in my hometown. Then Chicago again and for the past nearly two decades.   People who move around a lot make me anxious.

When I think about how place influences writing, I go back to my earlier work that was always somehow taking place in rural settings.   When I was 10, my parent's built a house on a plot of land that belonged to my grandmother.  It was on a street that was once a tiny sliver of civilization butted up against a river and surrounded mostly by woods and corn fields in equal measure. Over time, route 39 came through bisecting that larger plot of land from a nearby forest preserve.  Other subdivisions were built but not in comfortable walking distance, there being no sidewalks and only one streetlight above the gate to a small private park across the street. The neighbors at the back had horses in pens that would make a ruckus and occasionally escape.  Deer regularly ran through the yard and dangerously across the road in front of your car.  My highschool looked like a prison set amidst cornfields right before you entered civilization.

The trappings of ruralness had pretty much vanished on the plot of land with my mother's generation.  My grandmother, before my aunt's house was built, grew strawberries in the large field at the back. They had chickens when they kids, and an actual outhouse for awhile before indoor plumbing. My grandmother's tiny red house was eventually replaced by cousin's tri-level.  The town encroached a bit more then stopped.  It still takes about 10 minutes by car to reach the nearest gas station, and another 5 to get to any type of store.

My poems in the beginning embodied a certain kind of ruralness that probably never existed, but somehow that landscape lived in my head, and bred far better poems.  So many of the fever almanac up til the last section are rural poems, or liminal poems moving across landscapes. girl show takes place in Nebraska, where my mother was born and where we would occasionally visit relatives in Blair.  A long gone house that sat across the street from animal feed factory and a Dairy Queen, and where I'm pretty sure I remember there being the story of a haunted breakfront in the kitchen. (though I don't think anyone alive is left to confirm this and maybe I dreamed it.) My great aunt & uncle raised rabbits and had a tree swing and a basement filled with birdhouses and creepy old school desks.

My other home as a child, however, was southern and mid-Wisconsin, where my father was born and where my grandmother parked her Winnebago at a small resort and we spent nearly every weekend camping there or elsewhere.   This landscape is all dark pine woods and sandy soil.  Sudden clearings and clear lakes.  My beautiful,sinister series takes place here.  My grandfather, until his death, lived in Black River Falls, know best as the locale for Wisconsin Death Trip, and we'd make a yearly pilgrimage to swim in nearby Hatfield and take long drives in those woods.  So many of the early poems that were subject to fire and floods happen in this landscape, moreso than the one I considered home.

Until recently, my only suburban focused work was the shared properties of water and stars--a sort of suburban fairy tale--all cul de sacs and creepy neighbors.  I've revisited this again with exquisite damage.  Until recently, I would have told you that other landscapes than suburbia held more mysteriousness and magic.  Now I'm beginning to think I was wrong. There is the kind of midwest gothicism that happens on dark country roads, but also in suburban bedrooms and basement in equal measure, and is somehow far more sinister.

It took me awhile after actually living in the city to actually start writing about the city.  Poems slowly began to creep in and soon, the work took place as often in this landscape as in any other. I do occasionally write Chicago-ish things..my archer avenue poems, shipwrecks of  lake michigan are good examples. I will soon reach the age where as much of my life has happened inside the city as outside it, and I suppose that shows up in the work. I did once, after all, write a love poem to my apartment and art deco architecture. There is surely such a thing as the urban gothic--though it's easier to think movies like CandyMan and The Crow moreso than any literary examples.  A similar prickliness of senses that happens in abandoned subway tunnels and old buildings. Maybe it's the way the old exists like a ghost simultaneously with the new..how entire blocks are leveled in days and transformed into something new so very quickly. In the fall, I was reading a book on Horror in Architecture as research on a series of poems based around HH Holme's murder castle, so perhaps something will come of that.