When We Say We’re Home: A Quartet of Place and Memory by W. Scott Olsen, Dawn Marano, Douglas Carlson, Wendy Bishop (review)

2 8 0 WAL 3 7 . 2 S u m m e r 2 0 0 2 When We Say We're Home: A Quartet of Place and Memory. By W. Scott Olsen, Dawn Marano, Douglas Carlson, and Wendy Bishop. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999. 306 Pages, $45.00/ $19.95. Reviewed by Jennifer Sinor Utah State University, Logan When Minnie Bruce Pratt, a second-wave feminist, writes in Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart, her meditation on home, “I was homesick with no place to go,” she describes a tension that many of us experience in our increasingly transient society: a desire for home that is not readily fulfilled (41). When your life is marked more by moving than by remaining, when you cannot claim to be a native of any state, when who you think you are is defined more by the land that you have left behind rather than the land on which you stand, the concept of home is complicated to say the least. Yet, desirable nonetheless. What we want, what we are homesick for, W. Scott Olsen writes, is “a place where the distance between us is shorter [,]... the safekeeping place of real histories” (13). What we mean when we say we are home is largely personal, which is what ultimately makes When We Say We’re Home, a self-described “quartet” of extended personal narratives, so successful. Each narrative adds another voice to the conversation about home, complicating and layering, never allowing “home” to remain stable, certain, or known. What is especially compelling about this conversation is the fact that while these authors share connections to the West, the stories that rise from that place are as varied as the landscape itself. This means that, in the journey to understand “home,” the “West” becomes less stable as well. Additionally, while the voices in this collection sound and feel different, they are unified in their insistence that home is less about a place and more about stories that come from place. For these writers, it is in the stories we tell that we know we are home. W. Scott Olsen begins the collection by exploring the desire for home as a desire for connection, a connection to a landscape, to people, to the myste­ rious. In the stories that we share comes the possibility of “reconciliation,” the movement one “step closer to the sacred” (8). Olsen’s stories of building a new house, getting stuck in a blizzard, and driving through Yellowstone serve as extended metaphors of his own journey home. What we learn with him is that you can never be far from home, as the particulars that you carry can be found in many landscapes and the connections that define home can be made at any moment, even in a place you have never been. Dawn Marano furthers the conversation by considering the paradox that defines her relationship to home. She writes, “I am most at what I might call home in a place where I don’t see myself belonging” (101). Because story is absent in Marano’s family, because she finds herself living in Salt Lake City as an outsider to both the culture and the history, and because she feels tolerated but not welcome, Marano has developed what she calls a “motel mind,” a way of meeting that world that is defined by departure and regret. Through her BOOK REVIEWS 2 8 1 journey, one also marked by stories of connections to people, to land, and to her past, we learn that being at home can be defined as much by movement and migration as by roots. When Douglas Carlson realizes that he must leave home in order to find home, he and his wife leave their longtime residence in upstate New York for the Midwest and then the far West. In traveling to new places, though, Carlson is struck by how he “kept coming across pleasantly remembered things in this unknown land” (187). Through the familiar, he comes to realize that it is often ordinary and simple stories that define home, stories we might easily forget or look past. And he, too, suggests, through an extended metaphor of...