The Importance of a Sense of
Place
I remember being told in a
graduate fiction creative writing course by John Dufresne
that I
use “excruciatingly tangible details of place.” And this is still true in
all of my
writing. I want to
put the reader there. PLACE is super-important in fiction, memoir
and poetry. It is
where you ground your characters, so the reader has a clear picture of
where the action is taking
place. And because they are grounded when these character
use dialogue they are not
just “talking heads” suspended in space.
Place to some extent is
synonymous with setting and if it is strong enough can
almost portray a character
in the work. For instance Jack London’s wilderness
(place) is so convincing
that it becomes the actual antagonist in his short story,
“To Light A fire,” in
which the main character dies because he’s out in the wilds
and doesn’t know how to
properly light a fire. London gives us the setting of
the outdoors in severe,
frigid, wintry weather, and plenty of snow with night
descending while his
character is trying to light a fire from a single match to
keep from freezing to
death.
Place can be a kitchen,
the woods, a church, the dining room table, etc. Once
you chose the location
here’s what happens—let’s say I chose the dining-room
table at
Thanksgiving. Mood and theme immediately enter our brains as well.
Is it a happy time, sad?
Perhaps because of a recent death in the family we have
the added perspective of
grief looming. Crepe is hanging from the mirror over
the sideboard. Is
the food on the table going to speak to the reader about what
kind of family this is,
what kind of kinky hang-ups they have?
In reading Jonathan
Franzen’s quirky, wonderful novel, The Corrections, we get
a scene at the dinner
table where Al and Enid and their two little boys Chip and
Gary are partaking of a
really yucky meal. Enid has served the small children a
mound of overcooked
rutabaga, liver, and turnip greens, if recollection serves me
well. So the older
boy Gary eats up everything and pleases the mother, while the
younger son goes through
all sorts of machinations not to eat, and at first the
father helps him by
polishing off some of the food on Chip’s plate and then says
that if the Chip eats
everything he can have dessert. The mother states she has
pineapple, the father says
that if he eats the dinner he should get something like
a cookie. The mother
doesn’t budge, the older boy eats the pineapple, and the
Dad feels threatened,
guilty what-have-you—lots going on in his thoughts as
well as the table. I
think I got this right—finally the father gives the order that
Chip will not have dessert
and will not move from the table till he finishes eating.
This creates conflict and
tension and many other opportunities for motivation,
cause and effect.
Another example of the
significance that a scene can play using a strong sense
of place is from Amulya
Malladi’s The Mango Season. Malladi makes use of place—
the heart of the house, in
this case an Indian kitchen. It is here where three
generations of women, plus
a sister-in-law and a cousin are cutting mangoes in
order to pickle them, and
where a lot of intimate family details are revealed with
a quite a bit of
cattiness, which displays each characters’ personality, traits, and
gives the reader insights
into family and its hierarchy.
These are only a few
examples of place in fiction. In poetry, what first comes
to mind first is the
strong sense of place that echo the themes and geography
of New England.
Maxine Kumin uses features and topographies of her world
and in her
poetry. In her fourth collection, Up Country, the poems are inspired
by her life near the woods
and on the farm, and the collection was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize. Another
poet who uses terrain and countryside as background
for his poetry is Robert
Frost. Yet another is Mary Oliver. But any good poet
worth his/her words knows
instinctively that the backgrounds, backdrops and
backcloths of good poetry
are necessary elements of craft to build the poem.
When I write poetry,
fiction or nonfiction, the people I use for characters are
portrayed in different
scenes. Usually images of places come to mind first before
I start a first draft. In
my poem “The Death of August” the reader knows
immediately where the
scene is happening. We get the landscape and panorama
and a picture is sharply
painted. Here are the beginning lines:
Last eventide before Corsican starfall
we watched sunfire slip to its descent
beyond the mountain that is Bonifacio.
In my short story, “The
Other Side of the Gates,” the main character Oreste Spano
is a prison cook. So
naturally we will see him at work cooking in that old kitchen.
Here’s the opening of this
story.
Oreste Spano struck a
match against the Regina Coeli prison's kitchen wall.
Lighting a cigarette, he
thought of his children. He'd risk anything to see them.
When the cigarette burned
down and he felt the heat on his lips, he took three
long drags and flicked it
upwards. The cigarette ricocheted off the rusty iron
window frame. It glanced
off his shoulder, bouncing onto the floor. Spano
crushed it.
The use of solid, concrete
objects and characters in a particular surrounding
or place can only infuse
the writing with force that spells control and the sense
that this writer knows
where he’s leading me, the reader.
Excerpt from my short
story “The Thief” published in the collection:
The Other Side of the
Gates (10/2014)
Thieving always came easy
to me, and I enjoyed it. I practiced, raising
my skill to an art form,
but never realized there was something more
important I needed in my
life until I walked onto the promenade deck
of the Oceana. It
was a revelation that shook every fiber of my muscles,
but I didn't learn its
importance until that day in May, 1988 when I
reached the marketplace in
Cairo, and stepped into the El Calili souk.
I
stopped by the railing as the ship hit some nasty weather.
The
boat rocked and pitched and my footing was unsure. I had
noticed
a knockout bookish type with a beard and horn-rimmed
glasses
at the fire drill earlier. He seemed a little stuffy, and
reminded
me of someone, but I couldn't place whom. The man
was
six feet of delicious. I'm a tiny girl, bottle blonde and have
been
described as a pixie, a word I hate.
From
the corner of my eye, I watched him stroll around, and
then
it happened. He casually bumped into an elderly gentle-
man
and lifted the man's wallet. Now, for sure, I was
determined
to make his acquaintance.
I pretended not to have
seen him, turned abruptly, and crashed
him.
Fortuitous? Hell, no. Calculated!
"I beg your
pardon," he said and introduced himself. "I am
Count James
Ausberry-Bickerford Contraire."
In
my heart I knew he wasn’t a Brit, and no way a count, but
my
lineage couldn’t even lay claim to being a Jewish-American
Princess
from New York’s lower eastside.
"Pleased
to meet you." I offered my hand. "Marchesa Titi
Patagonia,”
I said, dreaming up a title and hoping we would
hit
it off. Our meeting electrified the air like the ensuing storm.
He
kissed my hand, and with him still holding it, my other hand
was
on his money clip. Destiny? I left nothing to fate's whimsies.
I
laughed at his formality.
"My dear,"
"You have a wonderful
laugh." He extended his palm for his
money clip, money clip and moved his fingers as if
to say, Give it back.
"Caught!"
Not just me, but him too. I wanted him to think he
was dealing with a rank
beginner.
"It doesn't appear that you're in need of money." He
sounded
aloof, but no way
off-putting. He gave me a gander, approved.
I
was about to hand him back his money clip when I declared,
“Sorry,
I never restitute stolen goods—contrary to my principles.
I’ll
treat for coffee. This type of stealing isn't my specialty, but I
was
dying to try it after observing you at work with that man over
there."
I pointed to the elderly gentleman, struggling to open the
heavy
door that led to the game room.
The
Count hooked my arm, and his touch registered TILT on my
mental
pinball machine so much so that I placed my hand on my
racing
heart.
“Are you unwell?” he asked.
I
couldn’t be better, but went mute, thinking maybe romance
was
also in store for me, not just a possible business partnership.
He
escorted me towards the old man. "You saw me relieve the
gentleman
of his purse? I had mistakenly assumed that my
performance
had gone unobserved. An oversight." He bent down
with
the man's wallet in his hand, straightened and said, "Sir, I
believe
you dropped this." He then opened the heavy steamer door
for
all three of us.
This essay first appeared
on www.bridlepathpress.com 11/2013
