Early in the morning, in a high school classroom, it’s hard to engage a group of teenagers in creative writing. Yet, this public high school in Massachusetts had written and used a grant to hire me as their fall semester writer in residence. So here I was, once per week, playing stage magician, pulling different rabbits out of different hats, while some students engaged and others looked bored. Then came that morning when it was time to write about place. The rabbits and I were weary. So for the in-class writing assignment, I kept it simple. “Write about a place that you really love. Or a place where you feel very uncomfortable.”
Bingo! They wrote. Quickly, passionately, quietly. This time, most volunteered to share.
Church with Grandma. Their first day in a new school or a new town. Thanksgiving with relatives. The doctor’s office. Dad and his new girlfriend’s (or wife’s) home. This latter was the most common place and topic — the one that got the most nodding heads.
Dads’ new partners’ apartments or houses were too small. Too sterile, pretentious or frilly. Plus: Within these scary settings, Dad’s girlfriend asked way too many stupid questions.
There are three big takeaways here.
First, this place assignment stoked the students’ writing passion. It drove both the writer and their narratives (by the way, I can’t recall any “places-I-love” pieces). Second, even when we’re writing about a real-life place, we’re reaching beyond verisimilitude. We’re not duplicating a real-life snapshot onto the page. By the time we write about it, we’ve filtered that physical place through our emotions and memories to give it a makeover in which we omit some sensual details and forefront others. Third, place is more — way more — than the backdrop to the story or where our real-life or fictional characters do what they do. The place can be a mirror for what’s going on with us or our fictional characters. I mean, isn’t it unlikely that women who date men with dual-custody of their teenage children all have such awful interior-design tastes? More likely is this: These young writers were projecting and overlaying their own sensibilities and emotions into and onto those sterile kitchens, those uncomfortable couches and those wrong-sized TVs.
Actually, there’s a fourth takeaway here. Today, 15 years on, the students’ place pieces are the ones I remember. And, as I drove away from that school, I also remember feeling anxious, sad and a little lonely.
Turns out, neuroscience can explain my vicarious emotions. In her article on writing vivid scenes, author and editor Susan de Freitas writes, “ … as far as your brain is concerned, there’s very little difference between reading about someone doing something and actually doing it yourself.” This, writes de Freitas, is about mirror neurons — “a special class of brain cells that fire not only when an individual performs an action, but also when the individual observes someone else perform that action.”
So where our character(s) do something can be as important as what they’re doing or saying — even when that “where” is utopian or fantastical or IRL –in real life.
Let’s look at it this way: Could the 1942 movie Casablanca ever engage us without that heat, those buildings, that café? More recently, could Anatomy of a Scandal — Sarah Vaughan’s novel and now, a popular Netflix series—be set anywhere except upper-class London and the halls and quads of Oxford University? Could Nicole Dennis Benn’s novel Patsy, (one of my faves) be set anywhere except Jamaica and New York? Could the plots, conflicts and characters in James Joyce’s Dubliners be transplanted to Paris and the Irish author’s short-fiction collection get re-titled Parisians?
If these stories were transplanted, we’d question the veracity of the story and the authenticity and overall fit of the new written geographies. More, both on the page and in our imaginations, what make these stories zing is the interplay between plot, characters, conflict and place.
Except for my journal, I never wrote anything until I moved, alone, from Ireland to America. In my early writings, I wanted to show `n tell the Ireland of my youth and memory. Or was I playing to Hollywood and the transatlantic tourism industry’s versions of my native land? With time, I got the courage and skills to make my fiction and non-fiction writings grow more real, more transatlantic, more universal. Like my teenage writing students, I like to place myself and my characters in misfit places — in those spatial settings that mirror their inner worlds and dilemmas and what the late Josephine Hart called “a geography of the soul.”
This theme (misfit places) inspired and echoes through the 11 stories in my new short-fiction collection — or so I thought. Yet, when you place your fiction in coastal Massachusetts (three stories are on Cape Cod) and rural Ireland, maybe it’s inevitable that more than one reader emails to say, “I could smell the sea and sand.”
