"If you don’t leave home, you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen."
-- Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story
The words blew me away. I was taking a break from the painstaking task of course preparation, relaxing with a cup of coffee and Gornick's book about the personal narrative. It was a relief to be just reading something without looking for an answer, something I just don't do often enough. Her description of Harry Crews' essay "Why I Live Where I Live" was interesting, even engaging in a comfortable detached way. It was about Crews, not about me. We could not be more different, Harry Crews and I. He hails from the Georgia swamps; I am from the high, dry plains of Nebraska. He lives in Florida; Prince George's county, Maryland is as far south as I have ever lived or wanted to live.
But then he described his writing life and how his home in Gainesville gives him "a kind of geographic and emotional distance I need to write", and Gornick translated: "If you don’t leave home, you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen." And I started to cry.
-- Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story
The words blew me away. I was taking a break from the painstaking task of course preparation, relaxing with a cup of coffee and Gornick's book about the personal narrative. It was a relief to be just reading something without looking for an answer, something I just don't do often enough. Her description of Harry Crews' essay "Why I Live Where I Live" was interesting, even engaging in a comfortable detached way. It was about Crews, not about me. We could not be more different, Harry Crews and I. He hails from the Georgia swamps; I am from the high, dry plains of Nebraska. He lives in Florida; Prince George's county, Maryland is as far south as I have ever lived or wanted to live.
But then he described his writing life and how his home in Gainesville gives him "a kind of geographic and emotional distance I need to write", and Gornick translated: "If you don’t leave home, you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen." And I started to cry.
I just spent nearly a month in a place no longer my home, writing every day with focus and passion. Since I've been back, I have shifted from desk to chair to dining room table and from one coffee shop to another, trying to recapture the feeling I had there. I don't want to be tied to a place or a time of day or a ritual to be able to write. I want to be close enough to "home" but not too close.
The problem is that I have no sense of "home", and the emptiness of that realization hit me hard. Unlike Crews, "home" for me has no fixed location.Forty years in Maryland, and when people ask where I'm from, they get a five-minute answer. My writing has flourished not in some place with a mappable relationship to a long-time homeland, but in far-flung locations with seemingly nothing in common: the porch on Star Island, a slope overlooking the St. Lawrence River, the lounge car of a moving train, a coffee house in a small town. I am grateful for each of these places and the many others I have yet to discover. But I will never be home.
RSS Feed