the best writing on place

snapshot-2010-07-22-11-58-45Last week I had the privilege of working with an exceptional group of writers at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. It was my second year there, and I’m delighted to say this collection of people was every bit as wonderful as last year’s group:  smart, generous, funny, game as all get-out. We did some good work, and I’m eager to see what those starts will yield. This isn’t a group to be easily daunted. We all know writing is hard work, and I’ve already heard back from a few members who’ve dug in for the long haul.

We took field trips two days of the five, but the other three days found us inside at a conference table. We talked about place in writing, traded stories about specific places in our personal memories, put pen to paper for timed writing exercises, and assembled a list of books that offer valuable insights to the writer wishing to access the power of place in her work. I diligently wrote those titles on a large flip chart we kept handy throughout the week. I less than diligently forgot to transfer the list to a notebook before leaving at the end of the week — !!!!– so what follows is an incomplete record.

You’ll all have to pitch in.  Anybody remember others?  Any readers want to add personal favorites to the list?

Here, then, are ten books I’ve found particularly useful in thinking about writing place:

The Meadow. James Galvin. I return to this novel every few years for Galvin’s acute observations, breathtaking prose, and sheer love of a particular place and the man who embodies it in human form. Read more about Galvin’s craft here.

Home Ground. Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney (catch a review of Home Ground here). A lexicon of terms Americans have used to describe physical places.

Mayordomo. Stanley Crawford. We talked about how work offers a useful lens on place, and this memoir of serving as head honcho for a New Mexican village acequia — the network of ditches that water the agriculture in this area — is a good example.

Power. Linda Hogan. This novel, set in Florida, is as mysterious and unsettling as all of her work. Read Linda Hogan and the power of place for more background.

Wisdom Sits in Places. Keith Basso. An anthropologist’s account of decades of work with the Western Apache, whose landscape is annotated by stories that remind people how to live.

Broken. Lisa Jones. A recent work of non-fiction about a quadriplegic horse gentler whose powers extend to healing people in the harsh and beautiful windswept plains of Wyoming. Compelling.

Divisadero. Michael Ondaatje. This novel works the power of the weather — in this case, a rogue blizzard — for all it’s worth.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Grace Paley. Stories of urban New York by a modern master. Find out why I miss Grace Paley, who died in 2007.

The Things They Carried. Tim O’Brien. Everything essential about a small group of soldiers in Vietnam is revealed by — you guessed it — the things they carried. An astonishing novel.

Invisible Cities. Italo Calvino. Calvino imagines his way along Marco Polo’s route in a series of short bursts of brilliance.

What titles have inspired you?


6 Responses to “the best writing on place”

  1. Rob Toscano Says:
    July 23rd, 2010 at 7:25 am

    Jerome Kaplan “Three Men on a Bummel”
    describes a bycycle journey through the Black forest of Germany. I’ve never read more humorous cliche in description of surroundings and happenings.

    pierre loti – Egypt

  2. Deonne Kahler Says:
    July 23rd, 2010 at 7:29 am

    Summer, thank you for this list. I’m familiar with a few of the titles (The Meadow is one of my new favorites), and I’ll check out those I didn’t know.

    I’d add Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven for those fascinated with desolate places (in this case, Greenland), and any of Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories. More gorgeous bleakness. (Hm, what do my recommendations say about me? Ha.)

  3. Sheryl de Jonge - Loavenbruck Says:
    July 23rd, 2010 at 1:03 pm

    I took quite a few courses from the UNM Creative Wr. Prof. Her: The White Horse A Columbian Journey gives a real feel for Columbia and her experiences there
    -n, Scott Momaday’s: The Way To Rainy Mountain is an interesting perspective on journey I also enjoyed Ancient Child and his feel for Navajo country.
    -Edwidge Danticat’s Dewbreaker takes us to Haiti at times and helps us understand a dictatorship (I also like her Krik? Krak!)
    -Soldier of Orange by Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema takes us to the Netherlands during WWII and to England where the Queen was ‘in hiding’.
    -Blue Mondays by Arnon Grunberg gives us a feel for Amsterdam, NL
    -Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling takes us to 1940′s Montana

    I could go on forever but I’m sure this is plenty, for the time being. Happy reading and I can’t wait to read the books on
    Summer’s list. The only one I’ve read is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I had lunch with Tim when he visited SUNY Brockport where I was teaching and my 2 Comp. classes presented him with booklets of reactions to the sections of his book.
    Well, take care…Sheryl

  4. Summer Wood Says:
    July 26th, 2010 at 10:10 am

    Thanks, all of you. I like your recommendations! Some of them — Perma Red, This Cold Heaven, Wyoming Stories, Rainy Mountain — are familiar to me, and I’m looking forward to checking out the others. (Sheryl, is it coincidence that three of your titles have colors in their names? I love it!)

  5. Jim Herod Says:
    August 4th, 2010 at 6:38 pm

    Anyone visiting northern New Mexico or living there should see the Valles Caldera above Los Alamos.

    The web site is
    http://www.vallescaldera.gov/comevisit/

    Forget about the Garden of Eden being somewhere in the MidEast. It was in Valles Caldera! I promise.

  6. Laura Manning Says:
    April 8th, 2011 at 8:20 am

    When we talk about the value of ‘place’ to writing, I must conjure the work of Eudora Welty. Welty wrote an essay on the subject many years ago in which she opens by citing something to the effect that place is the ‘lesser angel of fiction’. With such stated up front, i do not believe that she was relegating place to a lesser role in the importance of her writing; rather, she began this essay about the importance of place by noting how we (writers and readers alike) may overlook its value in creating contexts, moods, how it holds an arch of a story, provides the path on which readers enter the work of a writer. Any discussion on place can only benefit by a close look at the work of Eudora Welty.

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