Writing about place (Part one)

Ihad the opportunity to hold a workshop for aspiring writers  eight lovely ladies  in San Diego, California, two Saturdays ago. I’d handled a similar workshop for Marivi Soliven-Blanco’s San Diego Writers Ink three years earlier, and it was good to touch base again with the organization and its members. This time my chosen topic was “Writing about place,” and I put down some notes to introduce the subject.

I’m sharing those notes with Penman readers, many of whom, from the messages they send me, seem to be interested in the writing process. I’ll probably expand these rather disjointed notes at some point into a full-length essay, and provide more examples drawn from Philippine literature (my audience was American, so I tailored the selections to them), but in the meanwhile, I hope these will be of some help. So here goes:

At some point in writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, the need inevitably arises to write about place. Most often place is used as a location or a setting where important events happen; sometimes — as in travel writing — place is the subject itself, the literal and figurative destination of the piece.

There are many ways of writing about place — from the panoramic to the microscopic, from the comprehensive to the impressionistic, from the scientific to the evocative. Quite often these approaches can be combined and interwoven to reveal more than one facet of a place.

The kind of writing about place that most people seem to know is the touristy summing up provided by magazines like Travel and Leisure, thus: “The Catskills Mountains are a perfect getaway from the hustle and bustle of New York City, and a great place to soak in the best of fall, with picturesque hiking and horseback riding trails, quirky antique shops to explore, and gourmet restaurants and markets.”

That’s perfectly fine if a good time is all you’re looking for or seeking to convey, but most of us who write about place won’t be writing for the travel magazines. We may not even like the places we’re writing about, which poses another kind of challenge.

Place is never just place itself, never just geography or the GPS coordinates of a location, never just what the tourist brochure says it is. As any writing teacher will remind you, place should comprise and engage all the senses and not just sight—hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling. Place is people, food, experience, encounter, music, art, history, cost, market, souvenir, accident, serendipity.

Place is also rarely static; it is a moving picture rather than a still life. Here’s Francine Prose writing about Naples for the New York Times, in a piece that really talks about Renaissance art but which begins by focusing on something much more modern and mobile:

In Naples, the motorino rules. Pedestrians, cars, even buses meekly yield to the buzzing scooters piloted by daredevils whose average age appears to be somewhere around 13. The essential lesson the seasoned traveler has learned about crossing Italian intersections — step off the curb with a confident attitude and the traffic will stop — would mean suicide in Naples. There the red light is a concept beneath consideration, as is the distinction between sidewalk and street, and the only observable rule of road etiquette requires you to look cool and unrattled after coming within inches of being flattened by a swarm of schoolboys on motorbikes. Even the considerable pleasures of strolling the scenic, palm-lined waterfront along the Bay of Naples are somewhat tempered by the fact that the broad, cobblestoned riviera presents the youthful speed demons with an irresistible challenge.

Even in more familiar surroundings, one has to assume that, beneath the surface, things are always happening, and that it is the writer’s task to ferret those things out. Observe how garden writers can animate something as common and as unappetizing as mud:

The earth’s unlocking begins at the surface and proceeds by inches downward. Rains and sodden, quick-melting snows fall in the night and sometimes all day long but the hard mass of ice beneath the few inches of just-thawed soil prevents the penetration of the moisture. Mud is the result.

… There is a kind of ontological fitness to the mud’s preceding the greening of the earth, for both ancient myth and modern science concur that mud—sodden clay—is the mother of life and its first home. And mess though it certainly is—in the garden, in the house, one one’s boots, and on the feet of the dog and cats (who will go in and out all day long, just like folks, to check on the arrival of spring)—the mud is still exciting, a cause for celebration. And it is not just domestic life that celebrates: in the warm, moist twilight the red-winged blackbirds signal their return with sweet piercing notes in the highest bare branches, and later in the night the chorus of spring peepers, tiny invisible frogs, reaches a cacophony pleasantly troubling to sleep. From the arrival of that sound until the end of autumn, the true gardener will sleep neither as deeply nor as long as in winter, and will be glad of it. (Joe Eck and Wayne Wintterowd, A Year at North Hill)

There is a perfect moment for planting in early May, when the earth is as full of life as the bundle of roots you are holding in your hands, and leaf-green seems to stain the very air. Long soaking in the rain and a week of good draining weather has made the ground so soft and open that you scarcely need a trowel to make a hole, and when I scoop my hands in the fragrant soil to fondle it round the fragile roots I feel my fingers would take root too if I left them there any longer. Weeds come up as easily as plants go in; there is an almost sexual relationship between earth and plant. The ecstasy is short-lived, but that is the nature of ecstasy. (Hugh Johnson, Hugh Johnson in the Garden)

Note that these authors do something more than describe what they’re looking at or what they’re doing. They offer reflections on man and nature — a step that requires experience and wisdom. It’s almost as if the quieter and less active the scene is, the more work you have to do, the more observant and meditative you have to be. A good example can be found in Thoreau’s Walden, where he rhapsodizes about beans and weeds, perhaps to the point of tedium for modern readers.

Beyond nature, people make places come alive. Like New York taxicabs and traffic, many places wouldn’t be what they are without the people animating them. Take a look at what Rafe Bartholomew wrote in his recent book Pacific Rims about his arrival at the airport in Manila (Bartholomew was a basketball-obsessed writer who flew out to the Philippines to find out why five-foot-two Filipinos were so crazy about basketball):

Still half asleep when the twenty-two hour flight touched down at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport, I trudged through immigration and into the hectic baggage claim area. As passengers filtered into the room’s fluorescent yellow light, they began staking out territory around the carousel. A siren let out a long, plaintive note that set people scrambling for the final spots in front of the conveyor belt. The crowd was three deep at the coveted spaces close to the hatch where bags emerged from the basement, and weary travelers jostled for the best positions. There was something oddly familiar about their movements. When a tall American woman tried to squeeze into a gap between the two people in front of her, one of the guys with inside position bent his knees, spread his legs, pushed his butt out and made it impossible for her to get around. She backed off and began maneuvering through the tangle to find a sliver of open space. Again, she was denied.

 … The Filipino passengers were boxing out for position in front of the baggage carousel. I kept waiting for the American woman to execute a spin move around one of the guys’ backs to steal his position, but it never happened. No one was manhandling the female passenger, and this was a more civilized form of boxing out than what takes place beneath the backboards, but all the fundamentals were there. When it dawned on the woman that her attempts to worm her way to the front stood little chance against the other passengers’ exquisite defensive positioning, she rolled her eyes in frustration and settled into the second row. I, on the other hand, was all smiles. This was an auspicious sign. I’d been in the Philippines less than an hour and already I’d found what I was looking for.

More next week!