The best way to write about place, says Kent Ryder, is through an intimate, exploratory, conversational form of writing which he calls ‘the essay of place’. We need people to write essays in the first person, he tells us, which describe the act of imaginatively wandering around places. We need people to write about what there is to see and hear and feel in a place, delving into its history and musing about what it all means.
One of the best things about the essay of place, Ryder says, is that it’s written in an idiosyncratic way. The personally distinctive nature of such essays makes it clear that any place is experienced in multiple ways. This a good thing at a time when many people fear that the diversity of places are disappearing, that what Clifford Geertz calls ‘local originalities’ are on the wane.
I agree with most of what Ryder says about the essay of place. A lively, personal account will come much closer to bringing a place to life than something written in a third-person and ‘maddeningly theoretical mode’. But I’m sceptical about the extent of diversity among the essayists Ryder refers to. All the examples he gives of essayists of place happen to be white Americans: Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, E B White, Henry David Thoreau and others. And while they don’t all write in exactly the same way, there’s still something similar about their tone. A kind of supplicatory, lyrical sensibility infuses their work, as if their essays were written with devotional chants playing in the background, or to the strum of a melancholic guitar.
In At Home on Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place, a collection of multicultural American writing, all the essays are characterised by what the editor calls an ‘uncommon sensitivity’ towards place. Their writers linger over the spiritual meanings of place, with one insisting on the importance of a ‘deep ethical regard for the earth and sky’. A surprising number of other place-essayists speak of themselves in spiritual terms: as seekers, soul-searchers, pilgrims. Annie Dillard's most famous work is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for example; Tim Robinson’s collection of essays is Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage; and John Hanson Mitchell has written a homage to Thoreau called Walking Towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place.
Perhaps one of the reasons that these essays of place are so meditative in style is the fact that most are written about so-called 'natural landscapes' - about the Arctic wilderness, for example - or at least about agricultural locales. There's a quietness and a lulling rhythm that comes from walking in the bush, or working a farm, I daresay, that you simply wouldn't get in an inner-urban place. You have to write differently (don't you?) if you're writing about dodging traffic or riding elevators or zipping over to the pub across the street.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the kind of writing you find in Gretel Erhlich's The Solace of Open Spaces or Annie Dillard's work. Ethical rigour, meditative intensity, sensitivity, spiritual candour: these are all qualities I admire in a writer and aspire to personally. But not everybody does. Not everyone lives at Tinker Creek, for a start, or has the opportunity to visit arctic climes. Not everyone believes in spirituality, or values the metaphor of pilgrimage. And even though I do, I don’t want to read about place continually in that vein. Where are all the snappy, sassy, funny, irreverent renditions of place? What about the people who don’t want to prostrate themselves at the feet of the genius loci (as they call it), and who like a bit of tongue in cheek? Can the essay of place accommodate these people, and what might it look like if it did?
I’m sure that there are examples of place-based essays written in a less elegiac way than those in Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams or (to give a couple of Australian examples) by John Cameron and Pete Hay. While still finely-wrought, Jonathan Raban's essays are a little more cynical old-saltish in register, for example, than the work of Lopez and his acolytes. I’d love to know about some of the brasher and more unusual examples - examples of essays about urban places, perhaps - that are of course out out there somehwere. Kent Ryder doesn’t give any such examples, however, and as a result the diversity and idiosyncracy he seems to value in the essay of place isn’t borne out in his work.
References
Barnhill, David Landis, ed, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place. A Multicultural Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) (see introduction and essay by N Scott Momaday, pp5 and 28).
Cameron, John, ‘Dwelling in place, dwelling on earth’, in John Cameron, ed, Changing Places: Re-Imagining Australia (Sydney: Longueville, 2003), pp29-37.
Dillard, Annie, Pilgrimage at Tinker Creek (London: Cape, 1975), and Teaching a Stone To Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (NY: Harper & Row, 1982).
Erhlich, Gretel, The Solace of Open Spaces (New York: Penguin, 1986).
Geertz, Clifford, ‘Afterword’ in Keith Basso and Stephen Feld, eds, Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996, p261.
Hay, Pete, ‘Writing place: unpacking an exhibition catalogue essay’, in John Cameron, ed, Changing Places: Re-Imagining Australia (Sydney: Longueville, 2003), pp272-285.
Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (NY: Scribner, 1986).
Mitchell, John Hanson, Walking Towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley Publishing, 1997).
Raban, Jonathan, Bad Land: An American Romance (London: Picador, 1996).
Robinson, Tim, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (London: Penguin, 1986).
Ryder, Kent, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing and the Sense of Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), pp208-87.