Writing Place

'This is a blog about the world from the perspective of Abbotsford’, begins the Abbotsford blog (http://abbotsfordblog.com/), written about one of Melbourne’s industrial-cum-residential suburbs. ‘The universe of interest of the blog will be things in and rideabletoablefrom Abbotsford, as well as the whole of what used to be called Collingwood, including Clifton Hill’. What follows in the blog is a melange of entries about Things Abbotsford: tips for navigating bike paths, musings about history of the Abbotsford convent, snippets of local news, gig reviews, diaristic accounts of visits to restaurants, and plenty more.

When I first came across the Abbotsford blog, the idea of a place-based blog was completely new to me. I soon discovered a central site for American blogs of this kind, however (www.placeblogger.com), and thus stumbled upon multitudes of so-called placeblogs out there. ‘A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time’, it says in the introduction to this site. A placeblog might be written by one or many people, it might be written about things big-picture, mundane or both, and it most likely contains an amalgam of diaristic and journalistic entries. The key criteria, apparently, is that it’s all ‘about the lived experience of a place’. And one of the key aims appears to be to promote dialogue and ‘community’: to entice multiple contributors, provoke commentary from readers, solicit questions and ideas.

So far I’ve only had a brief look at few blogs on the placeblogger site, and I haven’t found one I’m really excited about yet. Nothing with the glib aplomb of the Abbotsford blog's opening blurb (‘I hope that ... in time, the blog may create a network of communities, rip open the seedy underbelly of this superficially increasingly genteel place, prompt the biennial Abbotsford Ball with belly dancers and fiery torches, and even achieve modest change’) - although I’m sure they’re out there. Some of the placeblogs I’ve glimpsed read more like do-it-yourself newspapers. With an assortment of news items, articles and columns contributed by a motley of writers, they seem much like standard online paper to me, only with a more parochial focus. And on the other hand, quite a few listed on the site don’t appear to be placeblogs at all, but rather personal blogs with an entry or two about a given place. But the potential for such things is obviously there: the potential to capture the sense of a place in a way that an essay or simple written piece could not.

Kent Ryder and various humanistic geographers (Edward Relph, Yi-Fu Tuan, Edmund V Bunkse) have waxed lyrical about the need for professionals to go to the horse's mouth when trying to acquire the sense of a place. You need to listen to what its inhabitants tell you, they say. You need to immerse yourself in their various 'genres of place': their recipes, architecture, community newsletters, tall stories, and so forth. The point of doing this (the argument goes) is to produce a written work which brings these different genres together, making some kind of summary statement about the-state-of-this-place-now.

Depending on its quality and character, I guess, a placeblog might be nothing more than a source, a 'genre of place' in itself, for someone wanting to produce a summary work about a place. A placeblog might amount to little more than a series of rehearsal notes for a book or a long essay, or it might be too diaristic or trivial in content to approximate an essay of place. But as I said before, there is the potential for a placeblog to present the kind of account that Ryder et al are looking for: to present a detailed, ruminative, profound exploration of a place, and at the same time to do more than an essay or a monograph could do.

A good placeblog might indeed offer a series of engaging entries written about a place over a period of time, and by this means amount to a rich palimpsest of observation, reflection and daily experience. And because it would be interspersed by comments and questions by interested residents, it would have the sense of being right at the horse's mouth, so to speak. it would directly incorporate some of the voices of a place's inhabitants in unplanned and hopefully felicitous ways.

Finally, a placeblog might also produce new modes of writing about place. It's almost sure to be written in a style different to the essayistic reverie I was talking about in my last entry (blogs.usyd.edu.au/writingplace/2007/02/does_it_all_have_to_be_so_seri.html). Placeblogger.com's creators proudly declare, in fact, that the blogs linked to their site are written in 'authentic, quirky, and funny voices'. Similarly enough, the Abbotsford blogger calls for 'truly diverse but universally quirky correspondents' to collaborate in producing information about their patch of Melbourne. Whether or not quirky is always a good thing, it seems certain that these sites bring a different and less reverent approach to place than the essayists of yore.

I'll keep looking for more examples...

References

Kent Ryder, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing and the Sense of Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993 (pp68-93 on genres of place, 209-20 on the essay of place).

http://abbotsfordblog.com/

www.placeblogger.com