Guest Blogger Lynne Barrett: Angles of Belonging

I love when two strings of my writing world suddenly knit together. A while back, I read an article online which so clearly laid out the landscape of submitting to lit journals, I printed out the 10 pages, and passed the link to students and writing friends.  Last month, my friend, novelist Christina Baker Kline mentioned that her writing friend, Lynne Barrett, was coming to our local bookstore in late May. The name seemed vaguely familiar and when Christina told me Lynne had written that fantastic article about submissions, I knew I had to have her on the blog.


Please welcome Lynne Barrett.


        I’m from New Jersey. Born in Newark, I grew up in Verona, and my parents’ families lived in Essex County long before that. But now I find myself a “Florida writer,” and since my third book of short stories won a Florida Book Award, interviewers ask me to comment on why Florida is a great state for writing and how it inspires me. 
        It is and it does, yet I know that I am also, somehow, always, a New Jersey writer. 
        Most of the stories in this book take place in Florida, but the opening one is set in West Orange, NJ, and across the Hudson in Manhattan (not far in miles, but to the characters, different worlds). Though I put this story first for other reasons, it is also a bit of a claim: this is my original territory.
        I could also make a case for being a North Carolina writer by training, or, if summers of scribbling count, lay claim to Maine.  We could ask why states are used to label authors at all. (Or regions— Southern, Midwestern—though it seems nobody is called a Mid-Atlantic writer.) But what I’ve been thinking about lately is how origin and residence, place and displacement, have informed my work. I’ve made this list of at least some of the angles:


Of:
In my deepest memories, I’m not “in” New Jersey but of it: sliding down a mass of honeysuckle on the slope in front of our house till I was sticky and fragrant, when I was four, or tumbled in a broth of salt water and sand at Lavallette. Like all the kids in my neighborhood, I learned the secret back ways into Verona Park, as I gradually expanded the map of my known world. When I write from this state of belonging, setting and character intermingle in a way that feels both exhilarating and endangered.  I’m always conscious that a character’s movements out into the world promise both adventure and loss.


Near:
Growing up where I did meant that cresting a street, looking out a high window, or gazing through binoculars from the Eagle Rock Reservation viewpoint, I could glimpse New York City’s skyline. On mornings when I walked with my mother to post a letter at the mailbox there’d be people dressed in their going-to–the-city clothes waiting for the bus.  This presence just offstage always had magnetism. And when I began to go to Manhattan myself, I was conscious of the double perspective: I’m here, but I know what it looks like from afar. Sometimes I juxtapose a character’s experience being in a place and then seeing it from some height or distance. I think this helps to create a sense of its reality and significance, whether the city is Los Angeles or Oz.


From:
I went away to college, and I was eager to go. But only then did I become from New Jersey and see the distance between how I knew home and how others saw it, or spoke of it without knowing it at all.  I had to explain and defend it. Even a week ago, when somebody said, “Oh, you’re from Joisey,” I snapped, saying I’ve never heard anyone from New Jersey speak like that. If anything we hit our R's extra hard. I’ve since known many people who are “from” a place that is not well understood, whose prickliness I recognized as like my own. If characters are “from” Argentina, or Alabama, I think about how they seek to define themselves rather than be defined. I remember that they’ve lost the comfort of belonging without thinking about it, that to be from is also to be away from. 


To:
Coming to a place, being new, not knowing the rules and manners of those who are “of” it, means you notice things its denizens don’t. Being an outsider is great writer training, and writing outsider characters is an opportunity to explore trouble, as they make mistakes, get lost, misunderstand and are misunderstood. I like to plunge characters into some new territory, which could be a strange town or simply a new workplace, and let them study its language and codes. Will the character learn what’s really going on in time, or figure it out just too late?  


In, Among:
I rarely visit a new place without feeling an urge to research it, I think because my drive to be oriented is so strong, though I tell myself it’s so I can use it as a setting. I’ll retrace my steps till I don’t need a map (though I pick up lots of maps). I think it’s better to learn a few square blocks well than just see tourist highlights. I try to find people who like to talk and set a stranger straight. It’s not hard: people love a listener. Once, in Mississippi, I was at dinner, working on my notes from that day’s research (I’d gone with an archaeologist to an Indian mound he was excavating), and the restaurant owner stopped to ask what I was doing. Learning I was a writer, he got his wife and her friends to move to my table to share stories and, soon, wine. Next day, as I was leaving my motel, a couple also checking out said to me, wistfully, “Oh, we saw you at that restaurant last night, with all your friends.”  I felt triumphant: I had seemed, for the moment, of the place.  Somehow this made me sure I could write my Mississippi story.


Back Around:
Once, when I was in my twenties and home for a visit, I needed to pick up a friend at Newark Airport. My grandfather wrote out directions for me, and I drove off.  His road numbers were the little, last ones you see on signs, the old roads that have been overlaid by highways.  One of his instructions read: “Turn where Dugan’s Bakery used to be.” I had to guess, and managed to guess right, and didn’t tell him how poignant I found it that he steered by landmarks no longer there. A person who continues in a place watches it change out from under him.  And one who comes back can’t help but measure what’s altered, can’t help but feel that there was some alternative life that would have been continuous, instead of ruptured.  The place revisited is always haunted.


With:
In stories, I like to combine characters who represent different relationships to the setting. I’ll have a first-time visitor meet someone deeply embedded in a locale, or bring together people who have arrived from different places, for different reasons, yet are now sharing and attempting to define a new “home.”  I pay a lot of attention to who’s on whose territory. In the end, I think the setting should act on characters and characters should affect the state of things in that place, so that we feel that nothing will ever be quite the same.


Notes from Lisa:  
           >>Lynne will be back in New Jersey on May 31, reading at Watchung Booksellers in Montclair at 7 PM, with a reception starting at 6:30. 
          >>Magpies, winner of the Gold Medal for General Fiction in the Florida Book Awards, is Lynne’s third collection of short stories. She co-edited the anthology Birth: A Literary Companion, and has won the Edgar Award for best mystery story. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at Florida International University in Miami.
         >>Everyone who submits to literary magazines should read  “What Editors Want,” from The Review Review (also cited in the L.A. Times and New Yorker book blogs). 

An Organized Room of My Own. Mostly.

Whoever said that everything takes longer than you think it will might have had children, a house, a spouse, several consulting clients, a visiting mother, balky electronic gadgets, classes to plan, books to review, two editing assignments, and a distracting habit of occasionally enjoying sleep and regular meals. This person was probably also trying to write something. Ha! This same person likely also was too smart to try, amid the above named chaos, to do a complete office de-cluttering and overhaul, thinking X number of days was probably enough.

Still, I did promise photos after the deed. Well, the deed is about 80 percent done.
And this is how the office looks now,

in contrast to how it looked then.

Then, there's this -- piles still awaiting sorting (yes, I know I am ridiculously lucky to have such a large home office...) and this mass

of electronic messiness (where are those cord bunching thingees Santa brought?).

No, it still hasn't been painted, the comfortable corner reading chair a friend is giving me is still not here, and it's still mostly filled with cast-off furniture and bins, and makeshift shelving my husband's company once used to display merchandise at his retail clients' stores. But now it's a room of my own in which, for the first time in a long time, I can see where my own stuff is stored. And not piled on my desk and floor. That's a start.

I thought at this point, I'd have some nifty ideas to pass along about how to best organize things, some ingenious new system I'd share, a few terrific tips. I don't. I can only offer that the tried-and-true advice works; toss out a lot (12 bags and counting), group what's left in ways that make sense, and be ruthless about what's necessary and what's just nice to have around.

Today's the first day in the "new office". I did find it easier to get through the to-do list and – except for that one file folder I could swear I put in the top drawer -- I spent almost no time looking for something I know is "here somewhere."

Writers' Houses, Cash Flow and the Geography of Creativity

And now, it's Mark Twain's house on the chopping block – maybe. Recently, it was Edith Wharton's house, also running out of funds. And so, I've been asking myself how much – and indeed whether – the houses of accomplished, revered writers matter. Is it important to keep them open for visitors, scholars, and tourists who have a vague recollection of having once read at least one of an author's great works or perhaps simply bored on a rainy vacation day and heeding the advice of a bed-and-breakfast owner?

I can recall being mesmerized, as a teenager, to be in Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon, but then I was equally awed standing over his grave marker. And had I known then how very little time The Bard actually spent in the Avon house, that he wrote mostly in boarding houses in dicey sections of London, I might have felt differently. Then again, I was awfully young.

When I travel, I do make an effort to stop in at any important writers' houses along the way, but usually only if they fall right in to my path; I can't say I make it an integral part of my trip, like a writer acquaintance of mine does. I don't keep track of which and how many I've seen and nor am I devoted to the pursuit, as others seem to be. But I've been wondering lately if either I've been remiss, if the place where a writer's most intriguing work happened is more important than I've yet to understand? Surely that must be partly true, or else those who are pouring selfless amounts of time and energy into raising funds to preserve writers' abodes are missing the point and I'm pretty sure they're not.

Does it matter – to history, to modern day writers, to literature in general – where a writer composed the best work of a career? And if it does, why? For inspiration? Motivation? To allow a deeper understanding of the writer's frames of reference? For the sheer good will toward literary arts generated by a well-preserved, revered site? These are all good and noble reasons, of course. I'm just not sure shrines are the right idea when it comes to promoting a healthy appreciation of literature among the general population.

Among writers, is place paramount? What do you think?

Some writers will tell you that where one works is incidental; that the place that matters, the one you need to be in, in order to write well, is the one you create in your own head. Others insist that one's writing space is all, that without their physical surroundings, the work of some of history's best writers would have gone nowhere.

There's a distinction I suppose between where one writes – an attic office, a corner of the basement, a shared studio away from home, on the 7:10 a.m.train, on the dining room table or edge of the bed – and the home a legendary writer has inhabited for a good chunk of their most productive writing years.

I saw Margaret Mitchell's tiny table and typewriter (always covered with a cloth when not in use) on a side wall of her extremely small apartment, when I visited Atlanta for a wedding a few years ago. It was at a time when I already had an unused bedroom in my house – a real room of my own -- to write in, but felt held back by the clutter, the proximity to my kids' antics, an older computer, a cranky radiator. Excuses, of course. Seeing Mitchell's "work space," I knew that what she was looking at when she wrote Gone With The Wind was hardly as important as the place she was at in her head.

A conversation with a noted memoirist not long after that convinced me that, while I could write anywhere, why not create inside my room (which hundreds of writers would no doubt be jealous of) a writing space that fed me? And so I did, tossing out boxes of detritus from my former work life as a public relations specialist, lining the walls with bookcases, upgrading my computer and -- closing the door. No writers will ever trek to my suburban colonial as they do to the homes of literary legends, but that's okay. It works for me. I even have a window with a nice view of my little neighborhood.

Which makes me think about where writers work as much more than a room; a writer's home is also about the rhythms of their household, the outside view, the milieu of their neighborhood, the social and cultural and historical nuances of their community and region, and the natural geography in which their particular house exists. Maybe for some, seeing where a writer sat while crafting a work you admire can translate – into inspiration, understanding, and a kinship. The creative process is still mysterious to me and the influence of place is something I don't quite understand myself. Why can I write most insightfully about my family when I am away from them? Why does being isolated for a writing retreat help coax essays with pages and pages of dialogue and a cache of characters?

I'm interested in seeing where writers lived, not so much because I think I'll learn some important insight that will make me a better writer, but simply because it's fascinating, often in a strangely ironic way, to see where anyone creates anything: The horror writer looked out on a placid farming vista. The author of romantic sagas had a cemetery out their back gate. The science fiction writer refused to move up from legal pads to an electric typewriter. The author of children's' books about animals barred pets from her writing nook.

But I'm equally entranced by visiting historic houses of the non-literary. The inventor of the telegraph machine which enabled Morse Code transmissions? His house revealed no more technological advances than any other house of the times, yet one has to wonder if perhaps the self-sufficient, closed world of his family's enclave, encompassing house, farm, and factory, fueled his desire to devise a way to move at least messages beyond the fences that bordered their hundreds of acres?



Do I think I'll be a better writer from walking the same floorboards as Twain or Wharton? No more than an amateur musician thinks they'll hit gold because they saw Graceland. But I still want to walk that floor, touch that desk, look out that window. And I can't precisely say why.

Still, it it hadn't landed in the pages of the New York Times, I probably wouldn't notice if the houses of some of America's most revered literary artists were, one by one, foreclosed, sold, turned into condos, or a pricey rehab center (all possibilities having been mentioned). Perhaps I should be embarrassed about that, but I also don't think I'm alone; unless one is a huge fan of a particular writer, the location, even the continued existence of their home, much less whether it's open for visitors, is probably unknown to you. And while I'd rather see these sites remain open, I'll probably be more likely, with my very limited funds earmarked for literary pursuits, to buy another book or book myself at another writing conference, rather than donate to the cause. Do I hope some deep-pocketed foundation or institution or individual more reverential or civic-minded than I saves these houses? You bet.

But I do wonder: Would all the time, energy, money and effort that would have to be poured into such a feat, do just slightly more good if it were targeted at getting people – not just writers – to read the works that were once written there?