original art by Sarah Hart

Many places have their iconic crop.  In New Mexico, where I live, it’s the green chile.  In Iowa it’s corn; in Georgia, the peach; upstate New York, apples; in Orange County – well, duh.

And northern California?

Okay.  So blackberries may not be the first crop to come to mind when you think of Humboldt County.  For me, though, blackberries epitomize the place.  They are luscious and juicy and rich with flavor, and they spring up rampant and uncultivated along the wild margins of civilization.  You have to work a little to get to the best bushes, and you might get a little scratched up along the way.  But you know it will be worth it, because when that fat dark fruit squishes against your taste buds and floods you with everything that is good and sweet and real, it brings as well an edge of tartness that grounds you firmly in the here and now.

Wrecker, which comes out this February, is set in amid the giant trees of northern California’s magical Lost Coast.  That’s Humboldt County, mainly.  And a lot of the trips I’ve taken to Humboldt, both before and during writing Wrecker, have included encounters with wild blackberries.  A few have included encounters with that other iconic crop.  But the legal system frowns on that; and besides, this book is about something else.

It’s about the thorny path and sweet rewards of raising a kid.  It’s about love in a world where not everything is perfect – some mothers land in prison, some friends disappear into the woods – but where, in spite of its tendency to break your heart, love is the only thing that has a shot at saving you.

I’ve asked the friendly people at Mad River Farm to put together some special jars of wild Humboldt blackberry jam.  It’s an essential ingredient for the blackberry jam cake I’ll be serving at Wrecker readings and booksignings.  For every jar they sell, they make a donation to the Humboldt County Library (go, guys!).  If you’d like to get some for yourself, you can reach Marika at 707-822-0248, or go to their web page at www.mad-river-farm.com.  I’ll be sharing recipes in future posts.

Enjoy responsibly, as the beer ads say.  In this case, I think it means washing the jam off your hands before you touch any books.

What foods say “home” to you?

photo by James G. Gehling for the NY Times

Looks kinda like a gang sign, no? A tribal tattoo? Something from The Matrix?

Actually, it’s a fossil from a time we know very little about, in terms of biology.  The Precambrian era was a very long hunk of time — about 4 billion years, to be imprecise — that predated the explosion of life characterizing the Cambrian period, 542 to 490 million years ago.  An article in yesterday’s NY Times by Sean B. Carroll describes recent work by geologists and paleontologists to access fossils prior to that period of intense proliferation.  In places like the Namibian Desert and the evocatively named Mistaken Point on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, they’ve discovered fossils that provide interesting, if puzzling, clues to the evolution of life from simple single-celled creatures to the more complex animals with bilateral body symmetry that showed up during the Cambrian.

This is news? Rock lays on rock, right?  Shouldn’t they just be able to look lower to find fossils from an older period?  After all, we know life dates as far back as three and a half billion years.

The trouble is,  there’s a lengthy period of the earth’s history — roughly 1.2 billion years — that’s gone AWOL.  Lost and unaccounted-for.  And disappeared with it are the trace evidence of life — the fossils — that might clarify the transition from billions of years of unicellular simplicity to the startling development of structural and functional complexity.

Geologists call this (writers, you will love this) The Great Unconformity.  To me that conjures pictures of a turn-of-the-century magician, a man out of step with his time in a mysterious and possibly lucrative and alluringly shady way, who must perpetually dodge efforts by the more boring conformities to toss him in jail and throw away the key.

No, no.  The Great Unconformity for geologists is a gap in the rock record.  You can actually lay your hand on it.  Go to the outcrop on highway 337 near the Doc Long Picnic Area in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque.  Lay your hand so your thumb points down and you can touch granite 1.4 billion years old with your lower digit; your pinkie will rest on sandstone from the Mississippian Period, roughly a billion years younger.

The significant distinguishing factor?  Precambrian rock almost everywhere is devoid of fossils.  No evidence of life.  While the massive sediments that accrued while this neck of the wood lay under vast inland seas are teeming with fossils of creatures who roamed the murky depths and crawled up onto the shores.

The Great Unconformity.  No-life to rampant life.  Ever remind you of your writing?

Whoa, now.  I know.  Hell of a leap.  But, still:  though the analogy is far from watertight, I think there’s something interesting in thinking about how those sometimes dull and awkward first drafts can morph into writing that’s possessed of a life of its own; something bigger, somehow, than the me what made it.

It feels like that to me, sometimes.  A quickening.  The quicksilver leap from raw material to a thing of beauty and intelligence and for which I can take only some of the credit.

And maybe not so quick, really.  Because the only way I know to get from A to B is through tuned-in exploration, patient excavation, and a really good dose of luck.

Not unlike the paleontologists who have hunted down the mystery fossils in the land lost to time.

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?

photo by Kathy Namba

Yesterday morning we woke up to spring snow, a layer of white that melted well before noon. Beautiful! Except for the fact that we’ve got apricot trees growing in our new digs here in Taos, and the branches are loaded with delicate white blossoms that mean a bumper crop of fruit this summer — IF they can make it through spring without freezing.

It’s a long shot, I know.  One good year in seven are the general odds for apricots in Taos County.  Last year we were swimming in fruit, so I ought to quit being so greedy and just enjoy the snow.

Hanging out among the blooming branches of fruit trees is one of my most favorite, how’d-you-get-so-lucky kind of ways to spend an idle hour. Bees buzzing, sun streaming past the petals, the smell that’s too earthy to call ambrosia. Who wants to go to heaven when you can sit in the crotch of an apple tree here and let heaven settle around you?

My friend Lucy Gonzales wrote about that experience in a writing class I taught in Questa in 2002. Eight years later, she’s got a book out — Treasures of My Valley:  Humor and Survival in Early 20th Century San Luis Valley – that describes not just the joys of spring but also the hardships of growing up native New Mexican, and the resourcefulness and cooperation it inspired. She’s got tales of picking wild raspberries, wearing bloomers sewn from flour sacks, driving a tractor, raising five kids, burying a husband. She’s got a lot of stories. Lucy is 92.

But the story I love best is the way she describes her “secret place.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about secrets in general and secret places in particular. One of the most provocative panels I attended at AWP considered the use of other people’s private details in fiction. What kind of responsibility do we have to the owners of those details when we borrow them for our own work?

Put another way, how much respect should we pay to the privacy of other people’s personal lives?

And places? Even our own places? Can we describe them without revealing their location? Can I say what they mean to me without insisting they mean the same for someone else?

I almost didn’t go to the panel.  Me? I’m hugely respectful of other people’s privacy (I thought). I rarely use details that arise directly from experience, my own or anyone else’s (I thought).  When I write, I take the kernel of a thought or an experience and cultivate it in my imagination (“culture it in a petri dish” is probably a more apt analogy, given the messy state of my mind) so that what emerges will, I HOPE, resound with the emotional truth of the original impulse while bearing no identifiable relation to that specific motivating detail.

But I went, and realized … all that “no sir, not me” stuff? Kinda bullshit.

All writers do it. Autobiographical or not — and I land far on the “not” end of the spectrum — we use the raw stuff of our daily lives as grist for the mill.

So the moral issue stands, for all of us. And sometimes it means a hard, hard choice. Abandon the felicitous detail — the one perfect capsule of meaning that motivates the whole story — or risk treading on something deeply valued by someone else.

Is there a way that the transformative power of art justifies this kind of theft? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m really asking.

‘Cause, the way it feels to me? If I use a secret — my own, or someone else’s — I’m risking some kind of bad karma. I’m risking having that thought or secret or experience taken away from me.  Door closed.  Story over.

Oddly enough, I excuse memoirists from this exchange — on the basis that we each own our own interpretation of our personal history. Memoir carries in its membership rules the one that says:  this is how I see it.

In fiction, we are doing something different.

Aren’t we?

Maybe you already write the west.  Maybe you write everything but.  Maybe you want to, but can’t get a handle on it for all the iconic imagery.  Maybe your own west is a personal thing, the downhill side of your body when you’re walking the flank of a favorite mountain, the uphill side when you’re ambling back.

But if you’ve ever thought about these questions — how to engage in words, that is, this mythic landscape, with its checkered history — you may want to head for the Associated Writing Program’s annual conference next week in Denver.  If you get there, you’ll find thousands of others for whom these questions are neither trivial nor fully answered.

Not to mention the thousands who could care less about writing the west, and have come only because, well, it’s the AWP, and God knows what would happen if they missed one.

There’s something addictive about the experience, I’ll admit.  Being among throngs of other writers for 3 days, talking shop, making connections, entertaining new ideas, trading insider secrets.  Drinking overpriced cocktails.  Bumping into semi-famous people. Catching that one explosively brilliant panel presentation that will provide you with grist for the mill for at least the whole trip home.

Noisy, exhausting AWP:  3 days in overpriced hotels eating bad food and keeping your cell phone on vibrate so that maybe you’ll feel it, at least — since you sure won’t ever hear it ring.  But if you’re lucky, you will go away energized, raring to return to your work.

I’m excited about this one.  It will be my third, and I’m kind of getting the hang of these things.  It’s nice to spend time amid so concentrated a group of writers.  And, even though there’s a lot of emphasis on creative writing programs and the growing credentializing (is that a word?) of the profession, there’s still an honest respect for the independent writer.  Even better, there’s a kind of collective awe around the literary work itself.

These are people who love to read.  They believe good writing matters.  God bless ‘em.

If you’re there, come see me.  I’m speaking on a panel on Thursday morning, 9 am, in rooms 102 and 104, street level of the Colorado Convention Center.  That one’s called “Writing the West:  the Transplanted Writer as Literary Outsider.”  I’ll be joined by Uma Krishnaswami, Pam Houston, and Rob Wilder.  My second panel is with E.J. Levy, Valerie Martinez, and Sawnie Morris, and is called “Border Crossings:  Women Writing the West Across Genres.”  It’s at noon on Saturday, Room 108 of the Convention Center.

More fun stuff:  I’ll be part of a reading offered by Taos writers at the Mercury Cafe, 2199 California Street, Denver, on Wednesday from 6-7:30.  Might just tell a story about a big black dog, a fast-running ditch, and a very drunk woman.  The next night there’s a 10th-anniversary party for A Room of Her Own Foundation at Mario’s Double Daughters, and the drinks will be flowing.  You don’t have to be attending AWP to come to either of these.  They’re both free, and open to everybody.

I expect there’ll be a fair amount to report from Denver, so be sure to check back.  And I’d love to hear from you — here on the blog, or in person up at the event — if these are questions you care about.  Feel free to write in and suggest a guest post, or just comment below.  You can reach me directly at summerwood@taosmesa.com.

And you know what else?  It’s spring.

Which makes me VERY happy.

Last time I promised more Siberia. Lucky you! There’s plenty of it to go around.

There’s so much Siberia, in fact, that it took Ian Frazier and two Russian pals five weeks and two days to cross it in a diesel-powered Renault step van. He wrote about the experience in a two-part article The New Yorker published last August.

Nearly anywhere Ian Frazier goes, I will follow. I first encountered his writing in Great Plains, his non-fiction account of the huge hunk of land (and its various denizens, human and otherwise) that makes up the American midsection. (Here’s a good interview with Frazier, discussing On the Rez, another of his books.)

Clearly, this is a man unfazed by size.

But if the American Midwest is big, Siberia occupies a different order of magnitude. All of the continental U.S. and most of Europe could fit in the broad swath of land – forty-six hundred miles wide – that’s loosely considered Siberia. It doesn’t exist, officially. Not as a political entity, anyway. But try telling that to the world’s largest forest, the vast expanse of tundra, and the miles on miles of steppe that comprise the region. Try telling that to the thirty-eight million Russians and native people who live there. (If you can find them.)

Try telling New Yorker readers about a landscape that foreign and that daunting – and you’d better have a few tricks up your sleeve to make it work.

My disinterest in Siberia notwithstanding, I read the article, “Travels in Siberia,” with absolute relish the first time through. And then I read it again, more carefully, to try to understand how Frazier manages to keep our keen interest while plowing through material that might more likely be encountered in a sixth-grade report.

The names of the mountains. The names of the rivers. The political borders. The climate, mineral reserves, transportation system, flora and fauna and history. Are you asleep yet?

Not if you’re reading the article. If you’re reading, you’re on the edge of your chair. The river does what? you say. No shit! How big are the logs? How cold does it get? Tell me more!

Because you are there, and that’s your buddy Ian pointing out some of the more interesting aspects of the place to you. He’s giving you some background information, weaving his presence, his agile intelligence, his wit, and his personal credibility into language that is both accessible and deftly structured for maximum pleasure.

If you give much thought to rhetoric – not just how to construct an argument, but, more broadly, how to structure any written work to persuade the reader to join your corner – this article is a goldmine of successful strategies.

The Ural Mountains, which cross Russia north to south from the Arctic Ocean to Kazakhstan, are the western edge of Siberia. The Urals also separate Europe from Asia. As a mountain range with the big job of dividing two continents, the Urals aren’t much. It is possible to drive over them, as I have done, and not know. In central Russia, the summits of the Urals average between one thousand and two thousand feet. But after you cross the Urals the land opens out, the villages are farther apart, the concrete bus shelters along the highway become fewer, and suddenly you realize you’re in Siberia.

In general, abstract facts are stingily allotted short sentences. Frazier saves his words for the tangible – what the reader can see, hear, feel, imagine – and varies the sentence length so that no paragraph feels overburdened with either fact or image. And he is constantly, constantly interjecting narrative: the obvious narrative line of his travels, and the oblique introduction of brief stories to illustrate ideas.

Makes me want to go somewhere. Kathy and I are headed to Tucson for a brief jaunt – springtime in the desert, all that jazz – but we’ve been kicking around the idea of a longer trip, too. We’re thinking maybe it would be fun to take a month and walk the Camino de Santiago across Spain.

In the meantime, I’m content to travel along with writers who can make me see and smell and feel the place they’re moving through.

Any recommendations of writers who have done that for you?

In the northwest corner of New Mexico lies a small jewel called Ghost Ranch. Its redrock landscape is familiar from the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived and painted there for fifty years; and in August of every odd-numbered year, a bunch of women writers from across the country gather to write, to learn, to share their stories, to drink wine, to hike the backcountry, and to have the tops of their heads blown off by that thing called poetry.

Well, poetry and fiction and drama and memoir… all these genres are represented at A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Women Writers Retreat. This year, the fourth incarnation of the conference, faculty included fiction writer Pam Painter, actor and playwright Ellen McLaughlin, memoirist Meredith Hall, poet Dana Levin, and a host of others at the top of their game. The quality of the evening readings blew my mind. Rita Dove, former Poet Laureate of the U.S., was in good company when she read for the group on Wednesday; her spectacular performance, remarkable for the intimacy of the setting and for the generosity with which she shared her thoughts and life experiences, fit seamlessly into the lineup of gorgeous work we listened to all week.

It was especially poignant for me, as it confirmed once more that this organization is one of the most unique, positive, and effective supporters of women writers that exists. I’m fresh off a two-year stint as recipient of their $50,000 Literary Gift of Freedom Award, a grant which allowed me to write WRECKER, the novel I’ve wrestled with since ARROYO came out in 2001. I’m immensely grateful to the organization for its support, and it was with the greatest joy that I passed on my imaginary tiara to the 2009 recipient, New Orleans writer Barb Johnson.

Haven’t heard of Barb? Trust me: you will soon. She’s an amazing talent wrapped in Southern humor and graciousness, a writer who conveys with strength and delicacy the heartbreak of life in Mid City, New Orleans – and the love that redeems it. I’m a new fan, about to be joined by thousands more when her first collection of fiction, More of this World Or Maybe Another, hits the bookstores in October. I’d spoken to Barb a few times before, but spending these days together at Ghost Ranch, and hearing her read a story to the group, assured me that she’s the real thing: smart, funny, original, generous; a writer whose intense language lets her story leap from the page and change the reader’s life.

I felt overwhelmingly grateful to be there, and to stand between two writers – Barb to one side, Meredith Hall, 2004 Gift of Freedom recipient and author of the already-classic memoir Without a Map (a runaway bestseller), to the other – whose work I admire and whose friendship I cherish. It seemed to me a great example of what AROHO does best, which is to bring together women writers whose work and lives enrich each other and spur each other to work harder, trust deeper, believe more strongly in the power of literature to transform our personal lives and to – yes, I’ll say it – make a better world.

That week at Ghost Ranch was a better world, and it was this world: no fantasy, but a real example of what work and intention and love can do when yoked to a worthwhile cause. A tremendous amount of all of those things went into the making of the retreat, and I offer my greatest thanks to Darlene Chandler Bassett and Mary Johnson, founders of AROHO and directors of prior retreats; to Kim Ponders, extraordinary novelist and teacher who threw herself into directing this retreat; to Tracey Cravens-Gras, a writer herself, who worked tirelessly to keep all the ducks in a row; and to all the gifted and generous participants who came together to make this week so tremendous an experience for all.

No question about it: I’ll be there in 2011. Can’t wait to see you then.

By which I mean to say:  this story is the real shit, and you should rush to read it.

We talked a lot in the workshop in Taos about ways writers reveal place, and I looked at this story with a special interest in how Quade tackled the task.  (I’ll try not to spoil your experience of the story by giving away plot points.  Seriously, you’ve got to read it.  It’s online.  Click on the first link above.)  First – clearly – there aren’t many other places in the country where secret societies of men reenact the Passion annually.  “This year Amadeo Padilla is Jesus,” the story starts.  “The hermanos have been practicing in the dirt yard behind the morada, which used to be a filling station,” and – bingo – we’re set not just in place, but roughly in time.  The story continues to accrue details that set it squarely in present-day northern New Mexico: we learn we’re close to Espanola, we get “Law and Order” and “America’s Next Top Model” on satellite TV, we meet Amadeo’s fifteen-year-old daughter Angel, pregnant and enrolled in parenting classes.  This is no caricatured New Mexico; this is the place in all its rough glory, with its cholos and its lowriders, its fringe Catholicism and contorted views of women and sex, its sense that family is all you have and that that’s why you betray them, again and again, for the sin of their importance to you.

What we don’t get are sweeping vistas of iconic landscapes.  We don’t get blue-framed windows or blossoming hollyhocks or adobe walls or howling coyotes.  We get exactly the details this story requires: nothing less, and nothing more.  An unnamed village where Amadeo Padilla grew up, the “roll of skin where skull meets thick neck,” the crucifix, “violence in the very carving,” hanging in the morada.  These are the details we need to understand the movement of the story, the slow burn of Amadeo Padilla’s growing awareness of his role in Christ’s Passion as well as in the human one unfolding before him.

I have nothing against hollyhocks.  I like adobe walls.  But in the same way that writers can rely on readers to conjure a picture of Paris in their minds without mentioning the Eiffel Tower, I’m happy to see this particular writer lay off the iconic images and direct our attention to the details that matter.

I’m fresh off the experience of teaching at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, a seven-day rush of great words, wonderful people, and – certainly for me, and I’m hoping for the 25 writers (in two groups) who traipsed about Taos by my side – terrific visits to places that reveal the heart of this region. The week started with a five-day “Writing the Where of It” course, alternating days in the classroom with days in the field, and closed with a weekend workshop, “Writing Around Taos,” spent exclusively out and about. I got to hang around with a bunch of talented, interesting, exuberant, good-spirited people who share a love for writing and a curiosity about Taos. What could be better? Well, watching people’s ideas and images bloom on the page in real time – and that’s what the workshops afforded me: the real-time unfolding of beautiful work inspired by the question of place and by the real places we visited.

I’ve got a few people to thank for all the fun I had. First, hats off to Sharon Oard Warner, who launched the first Taos Summer Writers’ Conference eleven years ago on a wing and a prayer, and who must be crazy-proud to see it grow into such a tremendous success. She’s got a crackerjack team working with her. Barb van Buskirk has an infectious smile and a handle on every last detail, and the MFA student interns are smart, cheerful, and always a step ahead of any trouble, quick to head it off at the pass. Teddy Warner (sex and pumpernickel, Teddy? – well, you got us all to smile for the group photo) was everywhere and did everything that needed doing. And Sam Tetangco, Lucy Dupertuis, Robin Brontsema, and Bruce (what’s your last name, Bruce?) were each stellar in carrying out their duties as van drivers for the groups – and brilliant writers to boot.

And the participants? I don’t know how I got so lucky, but to a person both groups were filled with the most engaging, accomplished, good-hearted writers a teacher could ever hope to meet. Watching you guys get to know one another, loosen up in your writing, and enjoy this place I love so much was a true delight for me, and one I won’t forget soon. Sam, Linda, Nancy, Pintki, Ian, Dove, Susie, Valerie, Cathy, Allyson, Lucy, Anne, and Leslie in the first group, and David, Tom, Julia, Jan, Marjorie, Marie M., Marie R., Kim, Jeanne, Suzanne, Robin, and Bruce in the second – you guys rock. Write on, and write well. You’ve got what it takes.

Writing is such a lonely occupation, most of the time. We sit at our desks or draped in our armchairs, the pen poised or computer humming… and we rarely get the chance to exchange ideas with other writers, to talk shop or compose together, to offer our work or listen attentively to others. For one week in July, the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference changes all that. I’m so glad I got to be a part of it.

I didn’t know what a ghazal was until my friend Veronica Golos showed me one she wrote. Her poem is called “Exile”, and because it’s still in progress, I can’t print it here; but the more I learn about ghazals, the more I understand why a poem on that subject might take that form.

A formal poem of Arabic origin, the ghazal is composed of up to fifteen couplets that bear a complex relationship.  It is an ancient form, originating in 6th century pre-Islamic Arabic verse, and it found its most famous modern practitioner in Agha Shahid Ali, a reknowned Kashmiri-American poet who died in 2001.  These are poems of love and loss.  “A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain,” says the Wikipedia entry, and though some might argue that that’s a fairly succinct way to sum up most of human life, there’s no question that it fits the bill when it comes to exile from a place you love.

It’s a big country, exile.  I’ve been thinking about the subject more since reading Veronica’s poem.  Formal exile – meaning that a return to your home would result in death or imprisonment – is the most brutal extreme, but aren’t there plenty of other kinds of unintended separations?  Sometimes, simply, we wander, and can’t find our way home.  Or maybe it was our ancestors who did the leaving or who were driven from home.  Sometimes we can’t go home because that place – the one we knew, the one that occasioned all the stories – doesn’t exist anymore.  In that case, the language of names and of memory may be all we have left of a place we have left behind, and the only means we have to pass on the sense of worth and of loss that surrounds those memories.

Even for people who may never have visited an ancestral or imagined place, the language can be enough to evoke the landscape.  Rebecca Solnit, in her marvelous FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST, relates that for Jews displaced to the diaspora, the descriptions of the Holy Land are in Hebrew, not the everyday Yiddish.  Through practice of that language “an indelible image of a then imaginary homeland kept those speakers from melting into their surroundings.”  She muses further,

I wonder sometimes about the merit of that miraculous tenacity, that adherence to a lost landscape and a senescent language.  A case could be made that they would be better off melting into the landscape as no doubt many now forgotten did, adopting native tongues, stories, places to love, ceasing to be exiles by ceasing to remember the country they were exiled from so they could wholly embrace the country they were in.  Only by losing that past would they lose the condition of exile, for the place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who had left it.

When I was a kid and crossed the continent to go to college, I surprised myself with a bad case of homesickness.  I missed my family desperately, it’s true; but I also missed my place, the woods and creeks and hills and pastureland and twisting back roads of northern New Jersey.  I consoled myself with the thought that when I returned for Christmas break I would borrow a car and drive those back roads for hours, letting the countryside bathe my eyes in a kind of running smear.  I did that.  I still do, when I go back.  But thirty years have passed since then and I’ve never returned to live there.

Yes, there’s a huge gap between exile and the kind of voluntary separation many of us choose.  But there are elements in common: the body-feeling (they don’t call it homesickness for nothing) of being away from the place where you belong, until you don’t; the dreadfully insular aspect of it – no one can understand your emotion but those who have experienced the place as you have, and have gone away. 

It’s customary for the final couplet of a ghazal to include the writer’s name, in one form or another.  Of course.  It is personal to each of us, that feeling of loss, the beauty of love “in spite of pain”.  But we know it well enough to empathize.

The Roman poet Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea – the land of the “barbarians” – for an, um, indiscretion.  Check out David Malouf’s beautiful and masterly novel, AN IMAGINARY LIFE, for a fictional account of that time.