In my big writing projects, landscape and geography have formed a major thread.
It’s most prominent in the novel that became Nearly Canaan, which is outwardly more about tensions with an unstable spouse, the trials of career ambitions, and a sequence of three locales that culminate in volcanic explosion on all fronts. Perhaps raising a personified landscape to the fore would have been too melodramatic, but it was an option I’m now seeing I overlooked. You know, the fantasy genre.
Even so, places are a primary ingredient in my fiction and poems.
My four years in the desert of the Pacific Northwest were a revelation. I felt myself on the brink of everything I had hoped for. It seemed embodied in the landscape, including the ways the Indigenous presence resonated in the earth itself.
And then everything exploded and I was, essentially, exiled from Eden.
By the time I could hunker down to collect the debris, I was on the East Coast. I had also lost the extended elation of feeling that my big breakthrough as a poet was about to happen.
I’d say I’ve leaned toward celebrating the good and lovely sides of life – a hopeful optimist, though I loathe that term – but I finally recognized in later revisions the importance of acknowledging the ugly, too, and the overwhelming desecration that’s occurred across this land and the globe despite what I saw in the better sides of the hippie alternative.
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I am a visual person and even considered a livelihood as a painter or graphic designer or architect back when I was in high school. Being named editor-in-chief of the Hilltopper ultimately changed all that. Well, much of my journalism career included selecting and cropping photos and designing newspaper pages. My visual art training wasn’t neglected altogether.
From early childhood on, I loved maps. Hiking and primitive camping in a rogue Boy Scout troop abetted that awareness. Growing up in flat Ohio, I imagined mountains. Even a bump on the horizon, say Mount Saint John in neighboring Greene County, seemed vast, at least on our bicycles. An ocean was inconceivable. The mountains I experienced were the Appalachians, especially a stretch of the Appalachian Trail we Scouts backpacked between my fifth- and sixth-grades. Those magnificent and dreamy heights didn’t have the craggy snowcaps that had captured my imagination, but they did introduce the sensation of being somewhere near heaven and looking down on the world, the way God would. (At least as I would have seen it then.)
Add to that history and historic places. Old log cabins and their unique smells are among the memories imprinted within me. I probably read the entire shelf of Landmark Books’ profiles of famous people in sixth grade, if not third.
In the middle of my sophomore year of college, I transferred from my hometown to the Bloomington campus of Indiana University, where I had hiked and camped in the surrounding hilly forests, but this was a more distinctive locale than I realized in my leap toward a degree.
I mention all this because I’m seeing how much a specific spot on the map has been an element of my poetry and fiction.
An important twist came when I was living in the yoga ashram in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania and our teacher, an American woman, returned from her first trip to India. She said the reason Hinduism has so many deities is that many of them reflect the unique vibrations – as she said, vibes – of the different locales.
Thus, it’s not just how a place looks but also how it feels with your eyes closed. Maybe even how it smells.
I hope I’ve conveyed that in my writing.
Subsequent relocations took me back to Ohio and Indiana, on to the mountains and interior desert of Washington state, and then, in exile as it felt at the time, eastward to Iowa, another corner of Ohio, and finally Baltimore and the year of intense keyboarding I’ll describe later. After that, I headed north to New Hampshire and now an island in Maine.
So here we are, wherever.
Jnana's Red Barn 