“Where are you from?” is one of those easy, straightforward, conversation starters that makes me squirm. I have resigned myself to responding, “that’s complicated,” or, since moving back to Baltimore,”I’m from here, but I didn’t grow up here,” which gets some funny looks as one could infer either that I grew up somewhere else, or I did not grow up at all. There is truth to both.
One of this week’s readings for class was about the importance of place in fiction. There were two wonderful quotes from an article about setting by Richard Russo. The first:
“Now that I’ve lived in Maine for several years, I’m often asked by virtue of my address when I’ll be writing a novel set in Maine. They don’t realize what they’re probably asking is when I plan to leave the state.”
Having lived in eight metro areas, this made me smile. Baltimore is the only place I have ever felt comfortable writing and occupying a the same time. All of this moving and coming home has been a strange blessing for my writing. I was away long enough – from age eight to thirty-two – that I have some distance from it, but at the same time I have always had family here, there have always been visits, and it has always been home. Even though I did most of my growing up around Philly, it never felt quite right to me, and even when I visit places in Philly that I enjoy, I am at my center agitated (or, less judiciously but more accurately, trips to Philly make me really, really bitchy). Baltimore is in my guts, so I can write about it without sounding like a tourist, but at the same time, I have enough distance to do it justice, or so I would like to think. And lucky me, I think it could be my favorite place to write about, other than weird little towns in Pennsylvania.
“Writers have to recognize and accept an essential artistic paradox – that the more specific and individual things become, the more universal they feel.”
This applies to the arts overall, and I do not have much to add. It is another lovely way of saying that at our core, we all have common stuff, and the more honest and bare we are in our art, the more we have to offer and the more likely we are to be accepted (maybe not by everyone, but it helps), if not understood.
