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Sense of Place
by Tim Parrish
One of the
most vivid memories of my childhood is the night Hurricane Betsy came to town
and my mother hauled us to our Aunt Helen's and Uncle Babe's (honorary, not
real, relatives) big brick house outside Baton Rouge. Using their place as a
refuge didn't make a whole lot of sense because tall pines surrounded it, and
throughout the night we watched through plate-glass windows X-ed with tape as
the trees snapped and shot sparks as though cut down by artillery fire.
 Sometime
early in the dark morning, the eye settled around us, quiet and damp, and we
eased outside into the eeriness for a few minutes before the wind screamed again.
The next day we traveled home, the roads scattered with limbs and power lines
and even an overturned pick-up truck. At our house, we found the street flooded,
the yard a jungle of branches and a felled oak tree. We had always had floods,
violent electrical thunderstorms, and constant refinery fires lighting the night
horizon -- but as I explored our yard, transformed into a wild place, I began
to realize that the place I lived had always been exotic, began to realize the
power of place itself.
 Books
weren't much a part of our house, but I did manage to run into Jack
London and John
Steinbeck and see that these strange creatures called "writers" also knew
something about place. Then, in seventh grade, I ordered a book from Scholastic
Book Services, The
Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories* by H.P.
Lovecraft, and became immersed in a bizarre world called New England. Of
course, Lovecraft's New England wasn't exactly the New England I live in now
(strange enough to a Southern boy), but a New England twisted by Poe's
sense of the gothic and macabre and by Lovecraft's own sense of the perverse.
 When,
in the story "The Colour Out of Space," an entire farm lot glows fluorescent
and rips away from the Earth, I thought of the chemical plant flares ripping
away from their smokestacks and curling into the air. When, in the "Shadow Over
Innsmouth," a town's population finds itself malformed by its ancestry, I thought
of the history of Baton Rouge, thought of the "red stick," a tree stained with
animal blood by Native Americans to mark tribal boundaries, thought of how whites
had taken the land and changed the name of the red stick, "isti huma," to "Baton
Rouge." Thought of those ancient things, both essential and toxic, that reside
in the ground with our forbears.
 In
college, already having Lovecraft's idea of the very soil inhabited and tainted
by history, I felt like Faulkner's Absalom,
Absalom was an old friend. Sense of place continues to inform the books
that hit me hardest. Moira Crone's Dream
State, Robert Olen Butler's A
Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, and Tim Gautreaux's Same
Place, Same Things shed amazing light on southern Louisiana. Likewise,
Brad Watson's Last
Days of the Dog-Men, Tom Franklin's Poachers,
and Nanci Kincaid's Pretending
the Bed Is a Raft, evoke the richness and exoticism of the much-maligned
state of Alabama.
 Place
isn't simply setting, place is the air and dirt that great characters thrive
upon. Look at Barry
Hannah and John
Edgar Wideman, at Jill
McCorkle and Brad
Barkley, at Rita
Ciresi and Mark
Richard and Chris
Offut and Eric
Rickstad. These writers know a thing or two about place, and they're willing
to share.
* Out of print,
but many of the same stories are collected in The Call of Cthulhu and Other
Weird Stories.
 
 
Further reading:
Jeffrey
Ford
Connie Willis
George Saunders
Lawrence Schimel
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