"A writer must have a place to love and be irritated with. One must experience the local blights, hear the proverbs, endure the radio commercials, through the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, paranoias, dialects, and failures, we come closer to our own reality... Location is where we start."
— Louise Erdrich, quoted in A Jury of Her Peers, by Elaine Showalter
Outside my window at this hour the smoke billows up from the neighbor's chimney and the pink sky goes sweet blue, toward black.
This is my home, my view, my slice of somewhere, and again and again, it appears in my books.
I write about suburban Philadelphia because as a teen I lived here and as an adult I returned here. I write about Juarez because once, in 2005, I took a trip across the El Paso border that changed my life. I write about a cortijo in southern Spain because I've been there, because once a man tall as royalty took me out into his dusty hectares in an open-to-the-sky jeep and said, Might I introduce you to my fighting bulls? I conjure a secret poet at Radnor High School because I once was one of those, and I story ghosts through a garden much like Chanticleer, down the road, because I spent two years walking through, week after week, and because a stone I had made for my mother rests there, beneath the katsura trees, and because I don't know where I'd be without seeds and all they beget.
I write where I've been, who I've been, what feels like mine. I have this place that I love. I begin here.
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By: Beth Kephart ,
on 2/7/2010
Blog: Beth Kephart Books (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Louise Erdrich, a writer's life, bulls, Nothing But Ghosts, UNDERCOVER, The Heart is Not a Size, Radnor High School, Chanticleer, Seville, Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers, katsura trees, Add a tag
Blog: Beth Kephart Books (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Louise Erdrich, a writer's life, bulls, Nothing But Ghosts, UNDERCOVER, The Heart is Not a Size, Radnor High School, Chanticleer, Seville, Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers, katsura trees, Add a tag
7 Comments on Writing What I Know and Where I've Been, last added: 2/8/2010
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I think underneath all fiction is an element of truth. Our characters and experiences come more alive when we funnel our own truths through them. Beautiful view and places of the heart dear friend. (Hugs)Indigo
Maybe that is what grounds your writing? That anchor of truth and weight of reality.
And I had to come home to mine. It took several books set elsewhere before I felt ready.
Beautiful. I write about where I want to go, but I also find hidden parts of the past.
I get your posts at night, which is kind of weird - it feels like I'm sneaking a look into the future. Hmm. Sometimes I can't write about a place until I've left it. I love William Saroyan's Places Where I've done time: 'Well, some places are happy places and some aren't, and that's pretty much all you can say on the matter."
"Location is where we start." So often this is what gives an author's work its authenticity, its grounding (as Sierra said). Your sense of place is very strong.
I deeply believe that a sense of place informs so much of what we write. I can feel that in all your work, and love it.