First Dreams and Acquaintances: A Meditation on Place and Culture

First Dreams and Acquaintances: A Meditation on Place and Culture Phyllis Barber Several years ago, when asked to teach a workshop at theWriters atWork Conference in Park City, Utah, the organizers requested the topic of place and culture—how one's personal landscape and place on the map inform one's writing. They also asked if I would speak to the topic ofspirituality or the wellsprings that feed one's reason for being. This caused me to speculate. To sit in the comfort of my 1860 wooden rocking chair and think. For a long time. What about personal landscape— one's community, one's geography, one's sense of what is important? What about spiritual and religious beliefs, those etheric shoes many people wear to give them a firm footing in the unknown? How can writers make use of beliefs that shaped their original kingdom and created the "givens" in their first world? A nagging question creaked in my mind like the curved rocker bar against the wooden floor. Do strongly held tribal/regional traditions create more havoc than they reduce, i.e., gang wars, subtle and not-so-subtle racial hatred, my-way-is-better-than-your-way mentality? Are people forever hooked by their original views? Does a strong sense ofplace create blindness to other ways of being? Does it provide a rich context from which to operate in the world? An even more nagging question occurred as I listened to the chair travel back and forth across several complaining floorboards. Is it better to have a generic mishmash ofa thousand melting pots, all ofus hypnotized consumers of e-personalized computers and the television news where newscasters in every region ofthe United States sound and look as though they went to the same broadcasting and/or finishing school?Just what is a culture? How broad can the term "culture" be stretched? How important is place? For many years I'd groped blind, iguana-like toward a comprehension of these questions. I'd written my own memoir, How I Got Cultured:A Nevada 73 74Fourth Genre Memoir, to unravel the ties that bind—wanting to understand how I had been formulated by lower-middle-class, conservative parents who were afraid to offend anyone who appeared to have more power than they did, and by their ramrod, warrior-like devotion to the Mormon faith. I wondered how the landscape of the windblown Mojave desert, a sun that blistered the entire sky and everything within its province, a heat that could turn my bed to an insufferable swamp at night, had affected my response to spatial and temporal reality. I also wanted to know how the tidy government town of Boulder City, Nevada, and the ragtag culture of 1950s Las Vegas showgirls had helped create my notions ofwhat a girl had to be to have The Right Stuff. As an adult looking back, I wanted to know what was the patina ofthis thing I called myselfand what the essence. What had I decided to believe about who I was? Looking at my growing up experience, here are some of the personal beliefs I uncovered, in order ofimportance. (1) Big breasts and long legs and show time were the only road to success, no matter what my mother told me. (2) Nevada and its people were, by and large, shabby compared to the world of NewYork, Beijing, Big Ben reflected at night on the Thames, and Notre Dame gargoyles. Nevada was a place of drifters, dented Airstreams, broken down cars and a few bleached homes placed like Monopoly houses on a sand-covered grid. (3) The desert was a poor place to live—no brooks, no glens, no meadows (even though Las Vegas means The Meadows in Spanish). Nothing could survive in the unrelenting sun, except the scrappiest reptiles and yucca yucca. (4) I lived in the middle of nowhere in a nervous family that was nowhere, except for the grace ofGod and the Mormon church. (5) Only Mormons had the answers to the question ofwhy human beings are here on this earth and where they are going. (6) Being a good Mormon was the only way to get gold stars from...