By Sonya Huber
Yesterday I drove from my hometown of New Lenox, Illinois, to Columbus, Ohio, a six-hour drive that I’ve made many times over the past twenty years. Sometimes I drove alone, singing over the noise of the wind rushing in the windows of a red pickup truck with no air conditioning, and later I drove with my son strapped in the back car seat as he grew and grew. The drive is as familiar to me as the lines on my palm: western Ohio along I-70 to the woods of eastern Indiana, to the circle around Indianapolis and the angle of I-65 that threaded northwest into the flatness of central Indiana with its hopeful windmills and its alarming billboards to the knot of I-80 that girds the southern border of Chicago.
What IS place, anyway? It’s an aggregate of the dirt beneath our feet, the decay built by aeons of plants and the crashing and boiling of minerals and stardust, the ebb and flow of species as they adapt to what they find. It’s where our feet are, where the forces of the universe anchor us so that we can have what we call “a life” and where our remains go when that life is done. It’s often the nearest expression of spirit, or wildness, or comfort; it can also be a prison, a gulf of miles that separates us from who or what we love; it’s a record of humankind’s wrongs, its violence and its erasure.
I thought about place a lot as I drove, singing along to John Cougar Mellencamp as he always emerges from the radio in Indiana, as I listened to the accents of announcers and advertisers shift from the beloved clipped-and-nasal Chicago accent to the broad southern-tinged of central Indiana. I tried to capture the love and heartbreak of being tied to a place in my recent book, Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook , and that’s what I focus on when teaching the craft of writing place .
I am fascinated with the way a place that is familiar gets under our skin and provides the materials to build our skin, bodies, and minds. I am fascinated with the way travel can peel off our skulls so newness can seed inside, but also the way in which a deep relationship with a known place changes over time, and the way in which these long relationships grow over scars and hurts as real, complex, and as contradictory as any human relationship.
Space and place are, if we step back a little, fundamentally mysterious, and physics now sees “ spacetime ” as “a mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum.” When I think about traveling over and over on this route, like an electron circling a nucleus, and think about the likelihood of me being here, and what it entangles me with, what unseen forces hold me here and yet also pulled me away, I can see place as a mystery, a longing, or a portrait, as the writer André Aciman describes in his beautiful book Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere as a “wishfilm” that adhered to the cities he loved (and I think he might links this to, or draw his ideas from the philosopher Walter Benjamin, but as I am writing this on my friend Jenny’s dining-room table in Columbus, Ohio, I don’t have access to that book—just the traces and paltry bits left on the Internet’s surface and the bits and pieces that mapped onto the synapses I carry.)
The nature of storytelling changes when you use place as a lens, rather than narrative over time, creating what Native American scholar and philosopher Vine Deloria, Jr., describes as “what happened here” instead of the Western view of “what happened then.”
Many of us experience a worldview in which place is setting or backdrop, the decoration or stage on which human action occurs. But place can give us not only details and sensory elements on which to tell a story; it can also give us new ways of seeing, hearing, remembering, and understanding the stories of our lives.
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SONYA HUBER ‘s new essay collection is Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook. She’s also authored Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto , and the award-winning Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and other outlets. She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield low-residency MFA program.
Come join Sonya to get really weird and reverent about the craft and art of writing place in her webinar Writing Place: Make Setting Come Alive for CRAFT TALKS on June 19 at 2PM Eastern. Register now ($25)/more information.
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