• home
• writing
• editing
• Mud
• about
• photo gallery
• the bloggery
• the vineyard
• contact

Return to Archives

Place

August 14, 2007

My proofread in progress is about Wallace Stegner, a name that's glimmered in and out of sight on my distant horizon for a long time. I'm pretty sure I found Joe Hill in the public library when I was immersed in U.S. labor and radical history -- when I was in my early twenties -- and that I liked it, but my interest was in labor organizers and martyrs and the encounter didn't send me off on a quest for more books by Stegner. This proofread might. The shaping power of place and shifty ideals of home intrigue, fascinate, and generally obsess me more and more as the years go on. My place is New England, but I still don't know what "home" is, other than where I am at the moment -- there's no place pulling me back into the past, and nowhere I long to be. (If there was one, you really think I'd still be here??)

So Stegner's place was the West -- primarily U.S. but also including Canada, Saskatchewan -- but he lived some of his years in New England, Vermont in particular. The West he lived his hardscrabble boyhood in pretty much disappeared over the course of his life, which spanned roughly the twentieth century. He couldn't accept the changes, says my author. I'm still near the beginning of the book, so I don't know what this means: couldn't acknowledge the changes; or acknowledged but didn't like them; or acknowledged but couldn't find himself or his life in them? This I want to find out. I've lived on Martha's Vineyard twenty-two years exactly, longer than I've lived anywhere else, long enough to have seen serious changes and to know people who've seen more, and even more serious, changes. To be rooted in a place is to set yourself up for tragedy. The idea has been surfacing in my mind a lot lately, paddling around, treading water, catching the light in different ways.

James Keelaghan's third CD, My Skies, is playing at the moment, and the liner notes are propped up to the left of my keyboard. On the same page of the lyrics for the title song is a quotation from Stegner's Wolf Willow:

. . . over the segmented circle of the earth is domed the biggest sky anywhere, which on days like this sheds down on range and wheat and summer fallow a light to set a painter wild, a light pure, glareless and transparent . . . There was never a country that in its good moments was more beautiful . . . It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones. At noon the total sun pours on your single head; at sunrise or sunset you throw a shadow a hundred yards long. It was not prairie dwellers who invented the indifferent universe or impotent man. Puny you may feel there and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow's fall.

My land couldn't be more different, and I live by the ocean, a vastness that doesn't mark the fall of sanderling or fishing vessel either. I've never thrown a hundred-yard-long shadow, and when the total sun has ever poured on my single head, there's always been a tree to shelter under. But I'm thinking it's time to come out of the shade and go looking for Wallace Stegner.

Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact

Copyright © Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved.
web site design and CMI by goffgrafix.com of Martha's Vineyard