A 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.
