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Idaho Librarian
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According to the introduction, this book "addresses the question of home." The issue seems to be what it is we call home and how that differs, or not, from where we live. Four writers address this theme: W. Scott Olsen, Dawn Marano, Douglas Carlson, and Wendy Bishop. I don't know if this was intended, but each writer lives in a different geographical region of the United States. Olsen's writing is predominantly Montana/Dakotas, Marano in Utah/Idaho, Carlson in Minnesota and Bishop in Florida. Whether one could count these as a good cross section of the United States or not, is arguable.
Section One "When We Say We’re Home."
Olsen muses about his travels through Montana, North Dakota, and elsewhere in the Upper West/Midwest states and New Zealand. He uses the weather to offset to what is happening in his life and family. In one section he lists everything in terms of physical distance from Fargo. Olsen speaks of the events in his family, and problems and issues with building a home. As with many of his stories in this section he tells us about the weather and its affects, physical or otherwise. He even gives us elevations and schematic floor plans of the home he has built. One would surmise that his sense of home falls somewhere in that place between memories and experiences with family or neighbors. It can be tied to places, but perhaps merely because we inhabit those places continually, or out of habit, or one might say out of comfort. We use the living room window daily to check the goings on outside; we know how rain hits the roof and can gauge the severity of the storm and thereby comes the comfort of home as place, and comfort of home as inner residence or peace.
Section Two: "Motel Mind."
Marano seems out of place, with her family and with her surroundings.
Her section of the book is titled "Motel Mind," which seems to support
this idea in some way.
. . . my motel mind, to that departure and regret when, outside a rented room, the door clicks shut on a dream space where anything is possible, where I don’t recognize myself, and I go back to being what I am, go back to where I live. (p. 103).She speaks of existing with family, but never really in the same way that Scott Olsen does. She describes visiting a genealogical library in Salt Lake City with her father and noting the distances between her and her father and other family members. Several times she mentions a void; one in which she assumes other families would have filled with stories that they would retell in affirmation of their relationships. She also notes a distance with the Mormon-settled roots of the valley: "I...understand that history near and distant presses upon us all in ways we may barely apprehend. So does missing history, especially when the history that's missing is our own.” (p. 124). She describes the unique Salt Lake Valley in geological terms, specifically remnants of Old Lake Bonneville that covered the valley in earlier times. She terms it “Near the Memory of Old Waters.” She draws parallels from those “Old Waters” to those in use in her home, those of showering, making coffee and sprinklers watering the lawn. In the West, water always comes up. The last section that Marano writes is of traveling “West by the Mother
Road,” as she terms it. She relates in memories, traveling with family
to Acoma, New Mexico, Sepulveda, California, and Ka Lae, Hawaii. One can
see this section to be an attempt to place her family life in a way that
makes sense, in the context of home. She ends with this paragraph:
In Hawai'i I am haole, a white woman. A stranger. In Utah I am a gentile, a nonbeliever. A stranger. But this is only one version of the story, and it's an old one. In the new story, in both places, and elsewhere, I am home. (p. 172).Section Three: “Map, Landscape, and Story.” Douglas Carlson is Writer-In-Residence at Concordia College. In part one, “Home on the Range,” Carlson writes of buying a seasonal cottage on the eastern shore of Lake Erie. Carlson's writing details his perspective of living on the waterfront over numerous years and seasons. He talks about storms off the lake and the erosion of the land in front of his cottage. He talks vividly of man's impacts on the area. In one instance he places PVC pipes to partition out plots in an area recently bulldozed, in an effort to satisfy his curiosity about the regrowth of plants and nature’s ability to heal itself from man's intrusion. He and his neighbors each approach the loss of their beachfront land differently. Ultimately nature wins. Carlson puts skids on his cottage and moves it further inland to escape the water's reach. In part two, “Homeostasis,” Carlson continues his story of the Lake Erie cottage, this time describing in more detail his efforts to save his cottage from the elements. He also speaks about some physical challenges that raise this homeostasis idea in his own well-being. He gives us journal entries about significant steps along the way to keeping his cottage livable. In October he tears down a room that he and his father had built. A deck is removed and skids attached underneath by the end of the month. Then with the help of a light snow, the cottage is moved. Carlson sets off this “loss of place” event against the death of his father a few months later. This idea of change and how environmental events precipitate/mirror other events in our lives is a strong one. Founded or not, this thinking often results in our attempts to make sense of things around us moving too fast. He ends with a retelling to his family of memories, stories from twenty-five
years of visiting a Cape Cod cottage near the seaside. He says of them:
But no stories with those elements we ask of a story: a beginning, some tension, an ending. And, of course, the larger and unfinished stories continue; after all, a family grew and changed and changed some more. But nothing to recount around the dinner table.Section Four: “Where I Live(d).” Wendy Bishop is a professor of creative writing at Florida State University. Bishop starts off with a poem, “Unwriting My Life in the West,” which is about two pages long and is heavily footnoted (24 footnotes in all). The poem alone seems introverted and difficult for anyone outside the poet herself to understand. This is probably why the following ten pages are the footnote explanations and they still do not give us enough nub to hang a hat. I have to admit I am not sure what is meant by the poem's title. Whether this means she divorces herself from any of her Western pasts, since she lives in Florida, or simply, exposes the roots of her self and her writing, either way I don't get the rationale for an exclusive poem with its explication. This smacks more of poetry/literature as therapy or psychotherapy rather than anything else, and as such may not really be fit for the "publicness" of publication. Bishop relates her living conditions in Alaska, Arizona, Nigeria, and ultimately Florida where most of her narrative concentrates. We see bits and pieces of shared lives, somewhat temporary, as well as a few themes. She uses earthquake stories, hummingbird encounters, relationships with neighbors, and physical comforts (or lack thereof) of living, to flesh out those parts of our lives that tend to be transitory and often not deemed worthy enough to put on paper. These types of things are those that we view as the humdrum events of living, that influence us and are important in the moment and we impart energy into them, but are usually quickly ignored or forgotten. But they often leave their mark. Perhaps these are the life molders we ought to watch, or watch out for, in order to explain our self's idiosyncratic behaviors. Bishop started with a poem, and also ends her section of the book with
a poem, “Autobiography.” We would presume that her "lives” are somehow
defined by her “homes.” The poem ends in this manner:
My lives line up like clothes on a clothesline. A shirt billows out in grass-I think the title of the book is misleading. One would expect more a celebration of home as more than a place to hang a hat. We actually get that, sort of. But we also get a wide-ranging treatment of everything from home construction to hysterectomies to camping with a group of untethered women. From that wide-ranging treatment we are left to figure out what they mean about this idea of home. That aside, the writing is done well. We would expect this from those who live by writing. The biggest fault I would attribute to the book is that it is too long.
Each writer gets 50-80 pages, which is a bit much for a general reader
to enjoy and be expected to make connections between the various sections
of the writing. I would expect that the best audience for such a work would
be those persons willing and up for the climb. This is not a high school
reader, but a serious treatment presented in a format where the reader
digs out his or her own meanings and is not lectured about this idea of
home by points, outlines or criteria.
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