The Poetics of Leaving a Place

Story is negotiated. Story happens from what we put on the page and what the reader takes off the page.

—Dorothy Allison, "Place," in Tin House

Let story be that kite, wild blue of sky, tug and beckon, dialogue and demand.

—Eli Clare, The Marrow's Telling

Locals call the collection of Rust Belt towns where I'm from "Downriver." Drive into town, past the Sibley Quarry, where limestone laces the earth. Piles of abandoned concrete and industrial waste rest quietly along the river, and the rest of town is strip malls and farmland. Enrico Fermi Nuclear Plant is down there in the township near Monroe, those two bulbous columns puffing steam clouds over Lake Erie, subject of the Gil Scott-Heron song "We Almost Lost Detroit." When you grow up queer there, you grow well-versed in the mythology of leaving, even though most people will stay, raise families by the river, near those small towns. Before I was old enough to hang out down by the river at Bishop Park and find some rough man-boy with flashy rims on his car to take me cruising, I spent most of my time at the public library, cruising the stacks and carrying books home to read.

Grow up and get out of town. Where I'm from is a world away from any kind of paradise for queers. For this reason, I still read queer literature hungry, longing for community, for any representation of places where your best chance as a queer kid wasn't to leave. This past summer, I sat out on the front porch of the Snatch Patch, a house I rent in another postindustrial city, writing about two memoirs on leaving. Kate Carroll de Gutes's first book, Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's memoir, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, are the kind of books I needed when I was younger, books that tug you forward into a queer future you couldn't possibly imagine yet.

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When leaving is the action in the story, how the writer constructs that process for readers, through style and form, matters immensely. There is a poetics of leaving. Do the characters pull away slowly from the moment of decision, or relish the sound of tires peeling out on gravel? Did they spend months taking themselves away, piece by piece? Was leaving a choice? What were the circumstances? These details change the feeling of the story, and feeling is ultimately what I go to memoir for. Where are they leaving, where are they going, why? How the characters move through place is revealed in their inner thoughts. Leaving implies the people in your story are about to be elsewhere, so the writer must show their movement through time and place. What works so well about the craft of these two memoirs is their approach to the subject of leaving—structuring the book in such a way that lets readers feel the intellectual, emotional, or spiritual rupture that happens when we find ourselves in an entirely new place. Both memoirs have a strong sense of movement and perspective, made possible through a lyrical style, which allows these writers to innovate around challenging subject matter.

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Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's lyric writing and cultural work has long told the truth of her survival through stories and theories spun in poetry and prose, with rich detail, in defiance of anyone who would try and stop her. The 2016 American Library Association Stonewall Award winner, and a Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award and Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2016, Dirty River tells lyrical stories about leaving home and creating queer-of-color community in Toronto. In her words, this is a memoir about...