Bi-Weekly Topic for June 15, 2004
It has been 13 months since Ecotone: Writing about Place began collecting essays on places, people and the ideas that make them real. Has consciously writing this way changed your thinking? Were there "Aha!" moments when you read, or when you wrote, something? (P.)
Happy Birthday, Ecotone!
By Fragments from Floyd
"How did you start thinking about 'place", and why did you start writing (or blogging) about it?"
One year ago on June 15, an energetic and eclectic group of bloggers, LiveJournalers and other web writers united to turn our words to the topic above--the first of what has come to be the "biweekly" opportunity to write about place. The online site bears the dysphonic but appropriate name from the field of ecology-- Ecotone: "a place where two natural communities meet and in which there is greater diversity than in either of the component habitats by itself".
Here is a list of the biweeklies to date, responses all totalled including several hundred essays, rants, lamentations, expositions and narratives somehow, loosely or tightly bound to place.
I think back over the names of people I've come to know as friends through the Ecotone in this year. It includes many of the place bloggers at Ecotone and also many readers--bloggers and non-bloggers alike--who have found Fragments via Ecotone postings or blogrolls of Ecotone writers. I'm not sure any of us could put our fingers accurately on what it is that binds us together loosely as a community of writers and readers. Maybe, in another year, we'll better understand our connectedness to place and to each other. I can say, there is something here that warrants digging deeper.
I tried to express my own motives and hopes a year ago by using the analogies of maps and lenses. I didn't say it very well but I still think I agree in principle with what I wrote in response to the very first Ecotone biweekly topic. My map is dotted now with pins marking the places of writers in the northeast, the middle-west, the southeast, the Left Coast and across the world--so many places I could travel to now and feel like "I've already been here because I read what he says about the countryside, where she goes with her camera, how they come back from their local haunts with word pictures from those mountains, towns or fields." And I gather many of you feel in some small way the same about Goose Creek and the Blue Ridge.
I'd like to think there is much more to say and many more writers to become involved in the Ecotone its offspring someday. It has become a resource for more than a few. The Ecotone writings have found a role in the dissertation topic described at Tim Lindgren's Where Project--an "experiment in place-based blogging." Who knows what other things are working behind the scenes.
And so ends the first year of Ecotone. Thanks especially to Numenius and Pica at Feathers of Hope for setting up and administering the wiki that houses the site. I look forward to getting to know more writers about place in the coming year; and there at one point, there was even some talk of a gathering some day for a face-to-face place-writer's weekend. Hmmmm.
Comments
I've been lurking and enjoying for a long time...at this juncture, I'll join in...Congratulations on a wonderful project.
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
ELEPHANT EAR in my back yard
This is a contribution to the June 15th ECOTONE wiki topic, Anniversary Place.
Happy Birthday, Ecotone Wiki! It's hard to believe that we launched this experiment in writing about place a whole year ago, but it is not difficult to remember the wealth of fine posts that have been written, the friends and connections made, the warm commentaries, and the hours spent contemplating the topics and trying to write something worthwhile in response. The Ecotone has, in the process, changed from an address in the ether to its own virtual place. It feels tangible because it is where I have encounterd real people who inhabit real places and imagine others, and it's a place where we have hashed out a new form of essay-writing in the blogosphere.
However it evolves or dissolves in the future, the Ecotone will always remain fondly in my writer's memory because it has prodded me into writing down many formerly inchoate thoughts about my own relationship to place. Much of my writing is about this topic anyway, but the Ecotone topics, with both broadly-sketched parameters or more specific focii, have forced a sharpened concentration into how I felt about, and remembered, different aspects of place - and that has been valuable to me, both as person and writer. They've given me an excuse to explore my childhood haunts in central New York, and contrast them with my adult home in northern New England, finding in the process new aspects of the girl who grew up somewhere inbetween. And now, finding myself drawn to a new, urban environment, I think a year of writing and thinking about place is helping me understand what's going on in our lives, and to sort through the emotional, as well as physical, ways that different places affect and change me.
But the most important gift I am grateful for on this Anniversary is the gift of so many new friendships. Good heavens, I can hardly imagine life before I knew Pica and Fred, Lisa and Chris and Jenny and Geoff, Numenius, Coup de Vent, Butuki, and Nancy, to name just a few of the place-oriented people I met first through the Ecotone Wiki. It has been a huge joy to see my old friend and correspondent "P." writing regularly here. And as the list of contributors has grown, I've been so happy to read new takes on place, and to encounter new parts of the globe through your eyes and your words.
What do we want to do in the next year? How can we increase our readership? I've been less regular in responding to topics lately because of other commitments, but I am no less enthusiastic than I was when we began. I hope other readers will suggest more topics, and that new ideas will emerge that will inspire us all.
8:36 PM
Ecotone, One Year On
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
On this day last year, a group of us tried to answer the question "How I Started Thinking About Place - And Why I Started Writing About It." My answer was, then, and remains now, Venice: Venice where Coup de Vent is making all kinds of her own discoveries as I write, she of the interesting camera angle.
Going somewhere SPECIAL triggered in me the impulse to explore place, but what keeps me looking, and sketching, and writing is the mundane, the far more prosaic space around me now. I think it would be a stretch to imagine that I could feel nurtured enough by ANY place to feel moved to write about it in a protracted way (like Beth, I find my mind goes dead in suburbia), but the routine, mundane holds my attention for now, following it through the seasons. Which plant. Which bird. Which pathway.
Which journey, really. There are so many, and we have so few days.
I'd like to thank all the other explorers of place whose sites I read daily for their own part in nurturing this particular journey of mine.
Posted by Pica at June 15, 2004 05:27 PM | TrackBack
Comments
I wouldn't have ventured the Ecotone would survive its first year. But here we are! Many thanks to you and Numenius for seeing to the daily workings of the wiki ("wikings?") and for keeping us focused and challenged.
Posted by: fredf at June 16, 2004 01:59 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/06/15/ecotone_one_year.html
The place of place
By Hoarded Ordinarie
This past Tuesday, Ecotone celebrated its one year anniversary. For those of you not familiar with Ecotone, it describes itself as “a portal for those who are interested in learning and writing about place. It came about as a meeting spot for a number of webloggers who write extensively about place in their own blogs and were wishing to work more collaboratively, as well as raise awareness to this genre of weblogs.”
This time last year, I wasn’t keeping a weblog; this time last year, in fact, I wasn’t writing at all. If I remember correctly, I was burned out on teaching; although I managed to muster the energy to teach a two-day-a-week Summer School class, I was mired in my dissertation and going nowhere with any sort of writing deemed “creative.” I certainly wasn’t “writing about place” in any sort of real way; instead, I was procrastinating on a dissertation that was supposed to focus on “spirituality of place” in American nature writing but instead was focusing on not much in particular. In a word, I was lost, tired, depressed, burned out: although I wanted to be writing, I didn’t know how or where to begin.
When I started writing my “Pedestrian Thoughts” essays last August, I started with a simple rule: start where you are. As a way of dealing with the burnout I felt writing scholarly prose about other people’s places, I decided to start writing essays about Keene, NH, essays I’d send via email to anyone who expressed even a remote interest in my corner of the world. “You have to start somewhere,” I thought to myself. “Why not start here?” My very first contact with Ecotone happened because one of my “Pedestrian” readers–a friend of a friend, a person I’ve never met–emailed me the link to Lisa Thompson’s field notes. He figured I’d find much of interest on Lisa’s site, and I did. Not only was she writing about her own neck of the woods, she linked to a slew of other writers–and an online meeting place for these writers–who wrote from the conviction that place matters and place starts at home.
My first contribution to Ecotone happened before I myself kept a weblog: on December 17, 2003, I posted an excerpt of my handwritten journal focusing on “Mythic Place.” (If you follow that link, mine is the 3rd entry down, under posts from Fred First’s Fragments from Floyd and a writer known as “P“). In that post, I came to the same conclusion as I had in my “Pedestrian” essays: place matters, and place starts at home. In my writing about “nature writing,” I always seemed to define “nature” as being somewhere else: surely Keene isn’t “wild” in the way that Henry Beston’s Cape Cod or Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Peak or John Muir’s Sierra Mountains are “wild.” But when you switch from “writing about nature” to “writing about place,” anything is possible. Place happens in cities, suburbs, rural towns…in a word, place happens wherever you find yourself. So place-blogging is simply about waking up and noticing, recording, and then sharing the mundane stuff that happens in your own backyard. When you think about it, how is that any different from what Thoreau himself did?
Although we Ecotoners have latched onto this term “place-blogging” to describe what it is that we do, I think many bloggers who wouldn’t attach that label to themselves do something very similar. Whenever Shane posts photos of the signs he sees in Los Angeles, I feel right at home: separated by an entire continent, we share similar eyes even though we find ourselves in distinctively different places. To my ear, Shane perfectly sums up the practice of place-blogging when he notes that he’s begun taking his digital camera everywhere and snapping pictures even though he claims to know nothing about photography. “I’m just fucking around,” he remarks, “and these images here are the ones I like and they’re from LA.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is place-blogging (or at least place-photoblogging) in a nutshell: stroll your neighborhood, fuck around, and share that fucking-around with the rest of cyberspace. Those of us in Keene find it oddly interesting that there are strip-joints in L.A. strip-malls: it looks like we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
So, why blog about place–why does place matter? For me there’s this constant desire to feel at home in a place, to feel at home wherever I find myself by noticing, recording, and remembering tiny details as they manifest themselves. Looking back to my childhood years, I vividly remember a particular picture book in which a child took a walk through a strange neighborhood filled with oddly shaped buildings in fantastical colors. When the child turned toward home, then, that walk was a retracing of the same buildings, shapes, and colors. Thus as a child I learned a valuable lesson: it is by noticing and remembering the sights, colors, and shapes around us that we become inhabitants of a place and thereby find our way home. Walking becomes a metaphor for paying attention and for remembrance, and even a strange neighborhood offers more delight than danger if you keep your eyes open.
I’d love to think that if any of you ever came to Keene, you’d recognize some of these sights: “There’s the corner with the lawn sprinklers!” “There’s that parking sign!” “There’s the building that was built in 1913!” These pictures, you see, map out a simple path to school and back: anyone looking for a scavenger hunt could look at these pictures and retrace my precise route. But ultimately, of course, these pictures and this blog–and this whole phenomenon known as place-blogging–aren’t about Keene: you needn’t come here and find the places I’ve seen. Instead, place-blogging is about going out your own front door and seeing the signs that greet you close to home. Blogging about place isn’t about extolling the superior benefits of any one locale: it’s about finding and noticing the particular charms of all places. Seeing what signs sprout spontaneously, like mushrooms, all over both L.A. and Keene, now you’ll find signs sprouting in your own neighborhood, some of them like mine, some not.
There are colorful people, memorable scenes, in all the world’s cities, in the country, in suburbs, and in various spots in between. Wherever there are people, there are eyes who have grown to ignore these details, thinking they’re a forgettable, second-rate opening act for the Real Thing. So when Mortality steps onstage, tuxedoed and top-hatted, to announce that this, ladies and gentlemen, has been the Main Event, there are gasps of shock and anger: is that all? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is all there is: this is your Featured Presentation, and you’re seeing it from within as it continues to unfold, no moment like any other. And since there is no way for you to petition Mortality for your money back–the ticket called Birth being nonrefundable–we might as well settle in to enjoy the show.
- This is my contribution for the anniversary of Ecotone. Ecotone is a wiki, which means it’s a website where anyone can add content, weblinks, etc. You don’t have to be a “place-blogger” to participate, so feel welcome to contribute to one of Ecotone’s biweekly topics (the one for July 1st is courage and place). Place, of course, is where you find it, and Ecotone’s a great virtual-place where you can meet and mingle with folks from around the world. Stop on by and make yourself at home.
Comments
A wise and beautiful post. We would all do well to appreciate our current place and moment.
Posted by: Tim Burns at June 18, 2004 10:13 AMThank you for a thoughtful post (again!) So important to recognise that this is what we've got, all we've got; that we have to make the most of it. Your celebration resonates with all of us.
Posted by: anne at June 18, 2004 06:30 PMAll so true. I especially like the Penuche's Ale House picture. I'm glad nobody was around to photo-blog some of the nights I lost in there back in the 90s. ;-) I remember the Launderette sign too. I think I knew someone who lived in an apartment right where that old sign points. Perhaps my memories are caving in on each other. It's right down the street from Penuche's, no?
Posted by: shane at June 18, 2004 09:10 PMTim & Anne, thank you for your kind words. If sharing a glimpse of my corner of the world inspires you to look again at yours, I will have accomplished what I set out to do. Thanks for reading!
Shane, I *figured* the Penuche's sign might bring back a (foggy!) memory or two! Although we live very close to "the 'nooch," I'm hestitant to frequent it for fear of running into my students! ;-) And yes, you remembered correctly: the Marlboro Street Launderette is right down the street from Penuche's.
Posted by: Lorianne at June 20, 2004 11:16 AMGreat post. I was getting bored with taking pictures on my usual walks, but you're absolutely right - there's much more to notice. Next time I'll look at things differently, inspired.
Posted by: leslee at June 21, 2004 09:41 PMLeslee, I'm glad you enjoyed this post! I too sometimes get bored walking the "same old streets." I've learned that there are two ways to deal with this boredom. One approach is to make slight variations in my route: explore a different street, or simply try walking the same sites in a different direction in order to view them from a different angle. The other approach is the exact opposite: walk the exact route, but pay detailed attention to the familiar but overlooked things you see everyday. Sometimes I imagine that I'm leaving: if this were my goodbye walk, what would I notice & cherish? I always seem to find something new.
Posted by: Lorianne at June 23, 2004 07:53 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040708183125/http://www.schaub.com/lori/blog/archives/000204.html
Anniversary Place
By Via Negativa
More than once, in the six months since I started blogging, I've written something quite by accident that seemed to comport with the current Ecotone topic - though until last month, I refrained from going so far as to actually enter a link here. In response to the above questions: for me, if I didn't regularly experience "Aha!" moments, I wouldn't bother to write - about anything. Place usually creeps in without my noticing.
spacing out on place
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
This post is my response to ecotone's (June 15, 2004) biweekly topic: Anniversary Place
About two years ago, I was reading The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. For those who know his work, it comes as no news that Sebald's approach to writing has much in common with the best of blog writing about place. It's not just that his seemingly autobiographical narrator wonders through the most amazing landscapes in England, Europe, or China, or other parts of Asia. It's also how he makes history itself into a landscape in which place is a map.
Consider this brief passage that concludes a section in which thenarrator' describes a great storm that destroyed the last of the great elm trees (the ones not succumbed to disease) near his house:
Where a short while ago the dawn chorus had at times reached such a pitch that we had to close the bedroom windows, where larks had risen on the morning air above the fields and where, in the evenings, we occasionally even heard a nightingale in the thicket, its pure and penetrating sound punctuated by theatrical silences, there was not a living sound.
For me, in this passage, like in all of his writings, there is a sense in which Sebald takes absence and restores itscurrency,' its sensory life, its immediacy, in a landscape that's been wiped clean of all traces of that life so that what was missing is found again, and what is plainly in view, such as the devastated landscape, for example, is masked and marked again by the life it once contained. Perhaps this is too dense, but what I am trying to say is that reading Sebald I got the sense that he made place into history, and history into place.
And it was that aspect of his work, as well as the style of his books that mixed curious passages from historical works, scientific theories, poetical musings, and photographs interspersed throughout, that made me think that he wasblogging,' and it was possible to write a blog in this fashion in which one writes about both time and place as the necessary halves of a whole experience.
So, I tried to write about my daily walks in my neighborhood with Sebald in mind, but somehow I couldn't quite manage talking about place or its history. The daily distractions of my life and my parade of responses to reading other blogs had me posting in spurts and in a hurry as to not miss some perceived timeliness to make into the lines around the hottest spots in blogaria. Within a year, I forgot all about my resolve to blog about place and time a la Sebald.
Then a review of Paul Carter's Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia had me waxing on about blogs and the blogosphere in general, and this post got me noticed by a few of the newly minted ecotone community ... and the rest is, well, not exactly history, but an effort still to come to grips with what exactly am I trying to do when I blog about place.
Perhaps this occasion, the ecotone anniversary, should serve as a reminder to me to bring back the focus on writing about place -- and with time in mind.
The funny thing is that, apparently, Sebald was a technophobe of sorts (he died in 2001). He did not like using computers, but one wonders if the many fine blogs that make faraway and foreign spaces into intimate places for us would have changed his mind about technology. One (at least this particularone') wonders if Sebald would have appreciated the ways in which technology, such as the ecotone wiki, can help make space timely and map its living history not in absences, but in the many voices that inhabit it in a continuous present.
So, here I am, 10 months into participating in the ecotone community with my posts, and yet, when you look back at most of my writing for ecotone, you will find that there is very little in it that describes or even gives a sense of the physical place in which I actually live. Most of what I have written has mapped memory and absences; but unlike in the work of Sebald, in my posts, these lacunae have remained more memorials than opportunities for resurrection.
Posted by maria at June 19, 2004 09:55 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20041014094829/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000373.html
Anniversary and Place
By London and the North
These thoughts are part of the collection of writings for Ecotone: Writing About Place - Anniversary and Place which is itself having an anniversay after a year up and running as a wiki. I was lucky enough to participate in the first batch of writings: How I Started Thinking About Place - And Why I Started Writing About It
A strange thing happened to me once at the end of a holiday in Madeira. It had been a good holiday, great scenery, air and food. As the plane started to take off I started to weep, bucketfulls. Paris, who was not able to be sitting next to me was alarmed. I guess other passengers must have thought I was a bit mad or something. After a while, things fell into place.
My dad died in 1974 in Florida where he had been living with his new wife since my parents divorced five years before that. We had not been close for years and and eventually I got a copy of his death certificate from Dade County or something. As I got into my twenties I tried to find out where he was buried. I managed to find out that he had been cremated (a rather unJewish thing) and thatfriends' took the ashes to be dispersed. I did not find out who these friends were and got no response from his ex wife.
Back further in time:
In 1966 my mother took my brother and me on a plane to Madeira. At that time, Madeira could lay claim to having the shortest commercial runway in the world which was built into the sea! But the reason we went there was because my father's career had at this point extended into crooning and song writing and he was singing in the casino in Madeira. He had written a song which mentioned the local airline and had got in exchange a number of free air tickets. We travelled there on the understanding that the flights were covered but after we got there we found out that my mother had to pay for them as he had used up all the free flights. We had a good enough holiday but there were tensions about money. My mother was the sensible bread winner and she felt very let down by his inattention to our basic needs. He loved new suits and hand made shoes and performing wealth but she struggled to find us school shoes.
So on again to that time in the late eighties when Paris and I went to walk the levadas:
High up on the volcanic island, on the Paul da Serra, I found a rock which I designated as my father's resting place.
This rock, like all other aspects of my father's death anniversary have felt quite arbitrary - dates, places, rituals. But then he was elusive in life too''.
Posted by Coup de Vent at 05:47 PM
Comments:
CdV, your lack of sentimentality in writing this small memoir made it even more poignant. What an enigma certain people are - my mother-in-law was like that too, even though I knew her "well". Her ashes are here in our house, in a blue box, awaiting distribution. I say hello every now and then. It's very strange.
I'm so glad you've been writing for the Ecotone and that I was fortunate enough to meet you through it.
Posted by beth at June 23, 2004 02:56 AMMost poignant and moving, CdV. Of course, you would be catapulted into the wellspring of the grief that never ceases. Congrats on allowing yourself just to open up to it.
Here's a very long Eulogy that describes my very similarly estranged relationship with my Father, who died about six months ahead of my plan to be at his side during his final days, weeks, months . . .
Posted by thomas brinson at June 23, 2004 05:49 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040624144818/http://www.airenet.co.uk/alife/2004_06.html
Anniversary Place
By P.
Not a blogger per se, I saw the Ecotone last year as an opportunity to do something I really needed to do, write, and a chance to do a little creative thinking within a loose structure. I was greatly flattered to be invited to share. What I didn't expect was that the others here would write so spectacularly well, and from so many creative perspectives! What I have read is more satisfying than the writing, and I can only say ... thanks.