Home and Away

vii Home and Away From the Editor I’d like to see a softball game between two factions in American literature: Home versus Away. The Away team, the exiles and movers, would be captained by Kerouac, Hemingway, and Henry James, the Home team by Thoreau, Dickinson, and Faulkner. While the Homers might be more patient at the plate, the Aways would have the edge in sheer aggression and ambition. No doubt Thomas Wolfe, all six foot seven of him, would bat cleanup for the Aways, having both strip-mined his own hometown for material and coined the phrase that defined the split. He would likely, in the style of his squad, swing mightily for the fences. If these team names—“Home” and “Away”—seem too bland, we can turn to Wallace Stegner for inspiration. Stegner, who, by the way, would be one of the home team’s better players, liked to divide Westerners into two camps: “Boomers” and “Stickers.” Boomers were those who came to a place, mined and exploited it for anything from uranium to real estate to tourism, and then moved on. Stickers were those who found a place they loved, stayed there and fought for it for the rest of their lives. Boomers and Stickers, then. But whom to root for? Judging by sales and readership, Boomers would have a bigger, louder crowd. But the Stickers have always had a loyal, if small, following (kind of like the Minnesota Twins). Stickers’ fans tend to romanticize those who go home again, like Wendell Berry returning to his childhood home in Kentucky. As Berry has written, the effort of truly knowing one place “proposes an enormous labor.” The results of that labor, whether with Berry in Kentucky or Thoreau in Concord, are often extraordinary, and some of our best writing of place has come from those who have followed through on the radical notion of staying still, of “wedging downward,” as Thoreau put it, in one beloved spot. For instance, here is Berry describing what happened to him after he returned to Kentucky viii Ecotone: reimagining place and fully committed to his home place: “I began more seriously than ever to learn the names of things—the wild plants and animal, the natural processes, the local places—and to articulate my observations and memories. My language increased and strengthened, and sent my mind into the place like a live root system.” The word “settling” is often a negative one in our culture—with its connotations of accepting less and giving up on dreams—but Berry puts the lie to this. In his words, the idea of settling in a place is nothing short of exhilarating. Since this is a journal of place, it might be assumed that our editors would root wholeheartedly for Berry and the rest of the Stickers. And we do root them on, we do. But immersion in a place is just one way to write, and if immersion has produced some brilliant place writing, then so has exile. Think of Hemingway re-creating Michigan from the distance of Paris, Wolfe imagining Asheville from New York. As with anything else in this sloppy life, there is no formula, and the theme of finding home, which so sparks Wendell Berry, could easily deaden a different writer. There are those who can only put words to a place once they have left it. And there are those who rely on cycles of movement, of leaving and returning, to excite them. For instance, this simple sentence stands out from the backs of Annie Proulx’s recent books: “She lives in Wyoming and Newfoundland.” Hard to picture without one hell of a straddle. But you can imagine Proulx, who for my money is as fine a contemporary place writer as we have, immersing herself in Newfoundland, absorbing its rhythms before migrating to Wyoming— so utterly different in climate and culture, smell and sky—where, from a distance, she re-creates the other world (while simultaneously immersing in and absorbing the current place). In this way, I suppose, both movement and settling would stimulate the work. So which team does she play for? The answer is we don’t know. Or...