Roundtable: Place in Nonfiction

Roundtable Place in Nonfiction Panelists: Kim Barnes, Lisa Knopp, Simone Poirier-Bures, Natalia Rachel Singer, Deborah Tall Moderator: Robert Root Ásense ofplace, both as an awareness within the writer and also as a component ofprose on the page, is a vital element ofcreative nonfiction, particularly in such forms as the essay ofplace, the memoir, the travel narrative, the nature essay, and Uterary reportage. Nonfiction writers need to understand how place influences them as writers and how their relationship to landscape and locale, setting and culture, affects the sense ofplace that readers discover in their work. For this discussion, we asked five nonfiction writers to respond to the same set ofquestions and then afigned their responses to create a roundtable on place. The paneUsts have written in a variety of nonfiction forms about a wide range ofplaces. Kim Barnes set her memoir In the Wilderness: Coming ofAge in an Unknown Country and its sequel, Hungryfor the World, in Idaho; Lisa Knopp, author of two essay coUections, Field ofVision and The Nature of Home, and the memoir Flight Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape, has located her work largely in Iowa and Nebraska; Simone Poirier-Bures has written a memoir about Crete, That Shining Place, and fiction about Nova Scotia, and her current nonfiction work-in-progress is about Kyrgyzstan; Natalia Rachel Singer is the co-editor of and contributor to the Adirondacks anthology Living North Country: Essays on Life and Landscape in Northern New York, and her memoir, When Monks Wept: Travels through the 1980s, ranges widely across the United States and Mexico; and Deborah Tall is the author of a memoir, The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island, and a book set in central New York State, From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place. Moderator Robert Root has written about past and present Michigan in Recovering Ruth: A Biographer's Tale and also writes 177 178Fourth Genre essays ofplace. The discussion centered on the role that place has played in the writers' nonfiction, the ways they have seen themselves in regard to place, and the means they have found to represent place as a character or as a presence or as a shaping force in their nonfiction. Root: The geographerYi-Fu Tuan has written that it is possible to answer the question "Who am I?" by pointing to a landscape. Describing his own "affinity" with a place, he caUs the desert his "geographical double—the objective correlative of the sort ofperson I am when the shaUow social layers are stripped away." Similarly, referring to her affinity with Trieste over half a century, Jan Morris describes herself as "not simply re-visiting the place" but "re-examining myself too." For you, what landscape answers the question, "Who am I?"What makes you feel an affinity with that place? Tall: I shareYi-FuTuan s orientation and agree withWendeU Berry when he says, "Ifyou don't know where you are, you don't know who you are." Both ofthe books I've written about places—The Island ofthe White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island and From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place—were written out of a passion for the places that are their subjects: the tiny island of Inishbofin off the west coast of Ireland, where I lived for five years in the '70s, and the Finger Lakes region of upstate NewYork, where I've lived for the past 20 years. But both books, implicitly, are also about myself. Moving from American suburbia to a stunning landscape in rural Ireland as a young woman was transformative for me—to suddenly have no electricity, heat, or running water, for example, stripped away the "normal" and made life come visceraUy alive. In describing my experiences there, and as a more mature woman and mother in NewYork State later, I was inevitably defining a phase of my life as weU as the place, showing indeed how a place can shape our characters and ethics. Both ofthese landscapes have helped me grow into the person I am today, so they continue to "echo" me, in my own mind. Barnes: My writing is so tied to place...