What We Said of It Becomes a Part of What It Is: Rendering Real Places

Truth be told, I have never thought of myself as a writer with a strong orientation to "place." I consider myself "the great indoorsman," product of the homogenizing, ketchup-is-a-vegetable, I-want-my-MTV 1980s. I am happiest when "place" means my office or the living room sofa.

In fact I grew up feeling a little ill at ease whenever compelled to consider place as a feature of my identity (as a person let alone as a writer), living as I did with a poet father who had such a profound attachment to the tiny East Texas town where he was raised (called Twin Groceries at one point in the mid-nineteenth century, after the competing businesses that sat on either side of U.S. Highway 67 in rural Hopkins County). My grandfather Roy Cowser had a small farm there, and my father retains an encyclopedic knowledge of the place's topography, its flora and fauna, a knowledge that comes through clearly in his poems.

But I never matched that connection when it came to my own hometown, tiny Martin, Tennessee, in the state's rural northwest corner, a place I always felt had chewed me up and spat me out. I could argue that all of this is my father's fault (this is doubtless my mother's position)—he moved our family from the white Cape Cod he and my mother owned in New Haven, Connecticut, to rural Tennessee as soon as I was old enough to travel, literally displacing me at six weeks old. But it's likely that my father and I are merely enacting, albeit on the humblest of scales, a generational shift that Louis Rubin and Robert Jacobs forecast as early as 1953 in their landmark study Southern Renascence: whereas southern literature "had always presupposed a strong identification with place, a sense of intense involvement in a fixed defined society," they suggest, "the best work of young Southern writers is not in these respects 'southern.'" No longer are southern people, as Allen Tate had once rhapsodized, "attached to a place."

Regardless of blame or responsibility, the impact of this placelessness on me seemed profound as I came of age. Though I lived there from the age of six weeks until I left for college, the good people of Martin never really considered me a native son but a Yankee whose daddy taught out at the college. A displaced person. Maybe they were right—even after spending those most formative eighteen years there, I've failed to retain even the southern accent. Then during his visit to St. Lawrence University last year, the essayist Scott Russell Sanders, another erstwhile Tennessean since transplanted to Indiana, said something I took down in my notebook: "Place is a geographical location saturated with stories," he told a group of my students. "Before that it's just landscape." Okay, I thought. Landscape I don't do, perhaps can't do, and that's been hanging me up, but what I have retained from my time growing up in Martin, and returned to again and again in my writing, are Martin's stories. Bearing Sanders's redefinition in mind, I've been working to reconstruct my development as a writer of place.

I will say that if Fate or my father had seen fit to displace me at such a tender age, and to a region with such stubborn soil, the writer in me is thankful that at least my family and I had been plopped down in a place rich with stories. In December 1970, four months after my parents moved there, Life magazine named Martin one of nine happy towns left in America, and, as a writer, I have always viewed that Life designation as a sort of goldmine. I may have grown up in what the larger world considers the middle of nowhere, the edge of the universe, but childish egocentrism (something I've never truly outgrown) always suggested to me that I lived at its center, and this Life article...