Place Is Heavy in Us: Commentary on “On Place, an Instruction”
- Place Is Heavy in UsCommentary on “On Place, an Instruction”
We’re going to reverse the order we write in “On Place, an Instruction” here, as we often take turns starting each collaboration.
Though we have never met, Justin and I began writing together in 2012, when I was living in northern New York as a visiting assistant professor and he was living in Nebraska—an in-between location between his MFA at Northern Michigan University and his PhD at Georgia State University. Which is to say, we began in transition, in temporary spaces. We began on our way to somewhere. Because of this, our work has hovered around maps and distance and fleeting locations.
In our first collaboration, “On Writing, Like Lust,” there’s a moment when I write, “I’ve torn a page from a map. It’s a section with two cities. One Chicago. One Atlanta. I’ve drawn a line connecting them. Tomorrow, I’m going to put the page in the mail. Address it you. So you can see how coordinates on a map can’t possibly show all the words between us.” I didn’t tear a page from a map, and I didn’t send it to Justin. This is another aspect of our collaborations, those in-between spaces of imagination, invention, and the intersection of two separate lives lived in two distant cities. I have always written to (with?) Justin from a vintage kitchen table I use as my writing desk, and since we began, that desk has been in a kitchen in New York, a basement apartment in Chicago, in the corner of a room (next to a door) in New Mexico, and currently in another corner of another room in Texas, but I was in that corner in New Mexico when I opened those five enumerated segments of “On Place, an Instruction.” [End Page 175]
When I receive a segment (opening or otherwise) from Justin, I work not to think too much about what I’m going to write and instead follow the travels of my thoughts. In fact, I write more essayistically with Justin than I do in my own writing. It’s a loosening, that’s what it feels like—an instinct. When Justin sent me the enumerated segments, I knew immediately I would reverse the progression, undo and echo what he had done. And I knew, as any effective enumerated essay does, the content belies the rationality and order of the numbers. Numbers and number sequences offer known quantities and predictable patterns—my content had to work against that. I didn’t know what would be in those segments, but I knew I wanted a kind of mirroring.
The mirror here in our work is essential, I think. We never inform the other of what we’re going to do in advance. We might have a starting premise or form, but the product is always an incantation offering to the other. The call and response of our method works incredibly well for us and always—at least, for me—induces a sort of game, in a way. We’re playing against and within each other’s words, racing to an end. As I read a segment Jill has just sent me, I ponder the next move, plot a strategy toward a finish.
Much of our writing has been drafted since I’ve moved to—settled in, rooted softly in, frozen in—Atlanta. So, there’s a new sort of permanence here in my echoes, but place and the wanderings of our work are still present. I am always writing toward the next place, and in response to the one I’m in or have left, much in the same way we write to the last segment from the other, and toward the next.
Both my responses to/collaborations with Jill and my solo writing are heavily rooted in place: physical spaces, lost spaces, environments lush or withering. This is sort of intrinsic, automatic. I think we both knew this before we started our first essay together, and so it makes sense...
