A few weeks ago, I came across my first essay of place. I’d just found a collection of nature writing titled A place on Earth -- a collection of small, personal essays of place from North American and Australian writers. Reading through the contents, one name, one essay drew me in: Tim Winton’s ‘Landing’. At a humble four pages, and tucked away at the back of the book, this was the collection’s smallest essay of place. But I wasn’t going to miss it.
In the essay, Winton muses about what it means to look at landscapes from the air, flying-high and godlike. He reminds us of the importance of landing, of traveling into the landscape for a sense of scale and a “quiet low- tech moment, a bit of humility.” He writes, quite literally, about getting back down-to-earth. And he does it - being Winton - in a beautifully laconic, personal, and down-to-earth sort of way.
I’ve been reading Winton’s fiction for years, so I was more than happy to stumble across this creative non-fiction piece about our relationship to the landscape. As I read it, I liked the voice I was listening to, I liked the style. Before long, I’d read all the other writers in the collection, and decided that I liked their style too. Here were robust personal voices. Here were writers with a love of the environment and a curiosity about the meanings of the natural world.
Then I read what Kent Ryder had to say about the essay of place in Mapping the Invisible Landscape. I couldn’t help but agree with him. The personal essay he described came very close to the essays I had already read and liked. For one, I especially liked the way these essays made me think. Essays, perhaps because of their length, seem to stimulate more thinking than they actually contain. Personal essays also have an unresolved, incomplete quality. They’re not as definitive as a poem, or a novel, or even an academic paper. They make no arrogant claim to knowledge: they are more interested in experience of the mind than knowledge.
But if Ryder helped me to articulate what I actually liked about the essay of place, he also made me realise what I didn’t like about it. The fact that so many writers pay homage to the form of the personal essay in their writing made me wary. John Cameron and Peter Hay in Changing Places: Re-imagining Australia, the editors of New Writing from Australia: Where the Rivers Meet, Mark Tredinnick in A place on Earth, and Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths in Words for Country: all of these writers uncritically endorse the more personal essay as the best way to write about place. They talk with an almost religious respect for North American place-based writers such as E.B White and Barry Lopez. In particular, writers like Tredinnick try to pinpoint why the essay of place hasn’t yet taken off in Australia. His message is clear: Australian writers should try to replicate and build on the canonical place-based literature of their North American forefathers.
Sadly, however, none of the writers question the form of the essay. This isn’t surprising considering that most of the new edited collections endorsing the personal place-based essay are coming from academics – humanistic geographers, historians, cultural theorists. These writers obviously wouldn’t encourage poetry of place or the novel of place. They are still in the business of non-fiction: they can’t stray too far from convention. So when Peter Hay explores how to write place and asks himself: “How is the essence of a place individually and collectively communicated?” I couldn’t help but think that he was really asking “How is the essence of a place to be communicated by an academic?”
Now I certainly think it’s a positive thing that place-based writing has encouraged academics to think about the way they write. As I’ve mentioned, I personally enjoy reading pieces in this vein. But I don’t necessarily agree that the essay of place is the best form in which to write about sense of place, like Ryder and his followers suggest. Not for everyone, at least. It might be the best way for Western academics to write about place, but who is to say it is the form best suited to indigenous Australian articulations of sense of place? And I’m worried about this desire to communicate the ‘essence’ of place: there’s too much of a temptation to essentialise when we talk about ‘essences’. Things start to get too slippery for my liking.
It's all very poetic for writers of place like Lopez, Anne Dillard and Aldo Leopold to talk about ‘listening’ to the essence of place; how nature ‘speaks’ to us, through its sounds and echoes (and silences). But in the end not everyone wants or is capable of that sort of intimacy with place. Perhaps the reason why essays of place are written in such an ‘elegiac’ and ‘contemplative’ tone (see Melissa Bellanta’s post "Does it all have to be so serious?”) is that the writers are really sharing and communicating a sense of belonging, not just a sense of place. Perhaps the controversial first person -- the ‘I’ –- is the culprit. And perhaps these writers of place think it’s more authentic when we communicate the ‘essence’ of a place we belong to.
But where are the essays of place where the writers express a critical sense of place? I would love to read them and I personally want to write in this way. Certainly some of the essays in Words for a Country come close, and maybe this is because the focus is more on representation and language than experience and ‘embeddedness’ in place. Mark Tredinnick, however, is unashamedly open about his editorial intentions in A place on Earth: when conceiving the collection he wanted to encourage the writers to explore a personally meaningful place. Something they belonged to. Even Winton talks about scale and landscape by looking at his much-loved Western Australian landscape. I cannot deny there is something seductive about this style. It got me at the start. Belonging and intimacy are certainly poetic, and part of the attractiveness of this style of essay, I’m sure, comes from our own very human desire to belong. But some don’t belong -- and I’m sure they’ll take the essay of place in a very different direction.
References
Bellanta, Melissa, ‘Does it all have to be so serious? Kent Ryder and the essay of place’
(http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/writingplace/2007/02/does_it_all_have_to_be_so_seri.html)
Bonyhady, Tim & Tom Griffiths, eds, Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia (Sydney: UNSWPress, 2002).
Butrym, Alexander J, ed., Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989).
Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (London: Cape, 1975) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (London: Harper & Row,
1982).
Hay, Peter, ‘Writing place: unpacking an exhibition catalogue essay’, in John Cameron, ed, Changing Places: Reimagining Australia (Sydney: Longueville Books, 2003)
Leopard, Aldo, A Sand Country Almanac (London: Oxford University Press, 1968).
Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Scribner, 1986)
Ryder, Kent, C., Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing & the Sense of Place (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1993), pp. 209-20.
Steward, Frank et al., Where the Rivers Meet: New Writing from Australia (Honolulu: Univeristy of Hawaii Press, 2006)
Tredinnick, Mark, A place on Earth: An anthology of nature writing from Australia and North America (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003)
Winton, Tim, “Landing”, in A place on Earth: An anthology of nature writing from Australia and North America, pp.265-268.
Comments
Luke,
I thought that the ideas you raised regarding the need to belong and the style of place essays were quite interesting.
The first thing that came to mind for me when reading the assigned essay of place reading was that these authors were writing to describe not only there individual places but as well their individual persons. Overall, the first impression I got from the essay of place was that they were written in a self indulging and unsophisticated fashion. I felt that such “essays” were better classified as memoirs and held little significance for academic consideration.
However, within the tutorial discussion it occurred to me that while authors of place essay may appear to be looking to explore their places in order to claim a place in which they belong and in essence that they belong (as discussed in our second week’s reading of Edward Casey’s Getting Back into Place), their motive may not be as egocentric as I initially assumed.
I realized through our discussion that the personal form of writing that place essay authors adopt is in fact another means of approaching history. One that while perhaps may not be academically researched or maintain facts and figures presents the history of place accurately as they have experienced it. I suppose that in looking at place essay this way I have come to that place essays are not necessarily a product of the authors need to belong but rather in some cases a desire to explain from experience if only to present a truthful account of place.
Overall however I agree with you that there is no right or wrong way to describe the history of place and I as well do not believe that place essays are necessarily a better approach than any other.
Posted by: Sam Sonshine | May 13, 2007 02:53 PM
Luke,
After reading your discussion piece (and just recently, your essay on the Blue Mountains), I wanted to say how thoroughly impressed I am with your writing which is incredibly analytical, intelligent and insightful. Your commitment to research, eloquent yet sophisticated writing style, and breadth of background knowledge/reading is to be commended.
In your seminar discussion, you write that you ‘especially liked the way these [personal] essays made me think.’ What particular thoughts were stimulated by reading them, and what new insights did you gain from these works that perhaps could not have been gained from conventional/critical writings about place? I would have appreciated an example or two to corroborate your argument. I also felt that your two paragraphs on the purpose/merit of the personal essay form in writing about place left me hanging. I was interested in your proposal that the reason the personal essay was so commonly employed in writing about place was largely due to the academically-oriented writers of the genre. This was a sound claim that I agreed with. However, when you elaborated on this argument, suggesting that the essay was perhaps not the most apposite form for articulating the essence of place, you failed to provide any alternative forms, or cite the reasons for why it failed in conveying ‘indigenous Aboriginal articulations of sense of place’ for example. I thought your criticism of the personal essay form was a little at odds with your admiration of the critical essay form in writing about place. (Are you critical of the personal style or the essay form in general?) At the end of the day, they both use a similar literary structure, but employ very different writing styles.
I agree that the tendency of place essayists to write in such ‘elegiac’ and ‘contemplative’ tones could be due to their desire to communicate their sense of belonging to a place. Yet, there are undoubtedly other essayists who write in this same style for very different reasons. Some other motivations may include: a desire to emotionally connect with and communicate to a broader audience the author’s own experiences (positive or negative) about a place, a self-indulgent yearning to focus on the autobiographical aspects of place, a need to express themselves evocatively so as to encourage others to appreciate the same place, advertising/tourism related reasons, and lastly, to write experimentally in a discipline that has become increasingly accused of channeling an objective and detached perspective of history.
Your long essay however, is a brilliant example of how writers can express a critical sense of place without necessarily subscribing to a sense of belonging. It was a very interesting and enlightening read. I am confident that if more people are able to achieve what you have in regards to the Blue Mountains, then the ‘history of place’ genre would benefit hugely.
Posted by: Anna Sambell | June 12, 2007 05:21 PM
Hello Luke,
An interesting and thought-provoking piece.
A quick response to the points you make questioning the form of the essay and that these writers “obviously wouldn’t encourage poetry of place or the novel of place” … Peter Hay may be the exception, as he’s perhaps better known as a poet than as an essay writer, with his poetry collections having been critically acclaimed as a poetry of place.
When you suggest the question Hay asks is not so much“How is the essence of a place individually and collectively communicated?” but “How is the essence of a place to be communicated by an academic?”, you’re in effect making a value judgement of Hay the academic writer over Hay the writer ... which would be a mistake, in my opinion.
Lastly, when you suggest that none of the writers question the form of the essay, Hay has this to say:
‘When I first started writing essays of place, it quickly became apparent that this literary undertaking is taxonomically remote from the learned ‘paper’ – that the art of case-making from allusion, from metaphor, from intuited or poetically-derived insight, from spontaneously propagated ideas, and occasionally from epiphanies, free of the necessity to conclusively ‘prove’, is both liberating and more authentically communicative. It is ‘more authentically communicative’ because the articulation of ideas which are not then ‘nailed down’ but allowed to remain invitingly open sets up a much more democratic and egalitarian communicative field than does more ‘rigorous’, vertically integrated writing which seeks rather to eliminate all but a single preferred meaning. The place essay, then, is an essentially mind/place dialogue that is closer to literature – even poetry - than it is to the learned paper.
“But I also find myself writing essays at the expense of poems. This is because I have never been much committed to poetry for poetry’s sake. I have no interest in those bizarre turf-wars over poetical theory that raise dedicated poeticists to such prickly heights of passion. It has always been for me less an end in itself than a mere instrument for the saying of things. If other forms of writing seem better suited to an end, then they are what I will use.”
Kind regards,
Ralph
Posted by: Ralph | November 3, 2007 02:25 PM