23. On Places – Stephanie Danler
Long before I could admit to myself that I was writing a memoir, I was collecting places.
Long before I could admit to myself that I was writing a memoir, I was collecting places. I would often recall the first chapter of Thoreau’s Walden, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” and think of how inextricable location and motive are from each other. Joan Didion, of course, is a master at this, echoing the psychological landscape with a physical one. In her case, those landscapes are often threatening. I would also think of Roland Barthes, who said in “Lover’s Discourse,” “where there’s a wound, there’s a story.” As I remembered places from my youth, I found wounds that had been untended for decades.
In the case of my memoir, Stray, I would take an index card, and on the front, I’d write a place—“Laurel Canyon,” for example. Then on the back, I’d write any details that came to mind: landslides, traffic, Lily’s coffee cart, squirrels stealing pomelos, care and threat, Fleetwood Mac, loneliness, losing the daylight. Another was “Owens Lake”—dust, a scab, my father, rattlesnakes, amnesia, mistrust of love, parched, the crime that created Los Angeles.
I had eighty of these cards, and most of them didn’t make it into Stray. But some of them were shockingly complete scenes and became cornerstones of the book. I only had to go back and ask, Why do you remember the rattlesnakes? Why is Owens Lake a scab? Why does loving Los Angeles, or loving my father, seem to depend on having amnesia? In answering those questions, I wrote a book. And I later realized that with those cards I had made myself a map. – Stephanie Danler
Prompt:
Meditate on places. If you’re working on fiction, perhaps choose places from that fictional world. The easiest might be your childhood home, but it could be: a restaurant, a street, a parking lot, a ferry station, a borrowed home in the Catskills where it rained for three days or a stranger’s glass penthouse where you once did too many drugs. Write down any images, details, or words that come to mind. Don’t worry about complete sentences. Don’t worry about describing the place as much as describing what it felt like.
This isn’t research, or even a place to collect lines of dialogue or turns of story. It is simply to remember, to feel out for a tender spot, search your own memories for the surprising detail, the “punctum,” which Barthes defined as, “the accident which pricks me.”
Alexia Marsillo
Location: Montreal, Canada
About: I work in communications and as a freelance journalist. The Isolation Journals came at the perfect time for me, as I had just promised myself I would do more personal writing. This particular prompt came at a perfect day as well, I was really missing my friends and feeling extremely isolated.
Age: 26
The Gazebo. It’s a simple place found in my friend’s backyard. From the outside, it doesn’t look like much, it doesn’t look like it could be so special. There are just a couple of couches surrounding a coffee table, which is usually littered with overfilling ashtrays, drink stains, junk food wrappers and a bunch of lighters. A string of simple backyard lights illuminate this gazebo. It’s a simple place with deep meaning. It’s where me and my girl friends congregate; it’s where we have enjoyed each other’s company the most. We’ve laughed, we’ve argued. It’s where we’ve brainstormed ideas for future businesses or side projects – some really good, some that have actually born fruit, and others just plain dumb. It’s where we’ve had real, meaningful conversations and it’s also where we’ve talked about the silliest, most meaningless stuff. The Gazebo is where we’ve gotten really high and stayed up too late playing cards on a work night. It’s where we’ve gotten over heartbreaks, giggled about new relationships. The Gazebo is also a place we’ve taken for granted – some nights we’ve wished we would have been less lazy and gone out to a cool place in the city. Some of us have complained that we do the same thing over and over again, and others have complained that we play cards too much for a group of 26 year olds. But, what we’ve often failed to realize and what we are now becoming painfully aware of is that we’ve never actually cared where we were or what we were doing – the only thing that’s ever really mattered is that we were together. Not everyone has what we have for as long as we have had it for. And now that it’s been taken away from us, I know for certain that I’d trade 1000 cool nights out for 1 Gazebo night in with my friends.
Dylan Brooks
Location: North Vancouver, British Columbia Canada
About: I'm a 27 y/o Canadian in practice; orbiting the planet of free form poetry/prose. What was once love letters is now a full-time creative writing passion, inspired mostly by self reflection and an outward connection to world around us. I have written nine poems prompted by The Isolation Journals project, and it's honestly THE closest I've felt to a community of artists. This has been a journey and the train won't stop here, so until it jumps the tracks, I'm grateful to Suleika and the Team for such a wonderful ride. Thank you!
Age: 27
when we were just kids – not even twelve years old. the i-95 carried us to where oranges grow. a long way from home to get to where we wanted to go – accompanied by family and a restless radio. driving night and day was typical – is this what they meant being on the road? it didn’t matter if it was early or late – if i was fast asleep or slow to wake – anything to reach the sunshine state. there was no curfew in the caravan at least not during those nights. so in the back i sat – watching mom and dad hold hands – they taught us love has no borders only plans. without room to stand i would watch out the window into the unknown. watching life take shape – frame by frame. a five second exposure of how we are all differently the same. hard to imagine when the cities would meet the coast. then again it takes 24hrs to florida from ontario. somewhere out there along the tropic of cancer i daydreamed in search of answers – static from the radio finally settled – and that’s when i first heard elton’s tiny dancer.
Lori Tucker-Sullivan
Location: Detroit, MI
About: I am a writer living in Detroit. I am currently working on a book about the widows of rock stars and what they have taught me about grief. Forthcoming from BMG Books in 2021. The inspiration for this entry was memories of my grandmother's house. As a child and teen, I never really liked going there (it was boring, a little scary) so I wanted to challenge myself from the prompt to write something lovely about this place (I hope I succeeded).
Age: 56
My grandmother’s house. As a child, it was one of my least favorite places. We spent a few weeks there each summer. We would visit extended family in east Tennessee and then drive twisty roads to Nanna’s house near the North Carolina border. One of twenty or so houses in a small cove framed by hills. White clapboard house with a low porch and one step. A porch swing where my sister and I would while away hours, bored to tears. Watch the florist deliver sprays of gladiolus to the funeral home at the end of the block. Walk to the drug store and use our high school French to confound the old woman behind the counter. Buy root beer LifeSavers and outdated copies of Tiger Beat magazine. Wake at 5 every morning to the sound of a siren calling workers to the cannery on the edge of town.
Inside the house was sticky-hot. It smelled of incinerator smoke and chewing tobacco. My grandmother was usually found sitting in a straight-back wood chair in the kitchen. She would have recently put away canned goods delivered by the grocery boy. He would line them up, then take her hand and tell her: this is beans, this is hominy, this is Campbell’s soup. In that way, she knew where to place them in the cupboards so she could find them later. My sister and I would approach her. She would hug us, then run her hands up and down our torsos. “You’re still fat,” she’d say to me. I’d let a sigh escape my mouth, grab a sweaty bottle of Coke from the refrigerator and head for the porch swing. It was always the same.
Dinner at a big round table after Uncle Charlie came home. Charlie stood six foot six and had the chest of a giant. Always in a t-shirt and overalls. A hammer hanging from a loop on his pants. He was Nanna’s brother. My grandfather had died in the Typhoid epidemic of 1930. At night, after Mayfield vanilla ice cream, we would capture fireflies and put them in jars. We’d play truth or dare and make each other do crazy stunts in the front yard.
My parents slept in a small bedroom to the left of the door as we entered. One step inside, just past the stair rail, four steps to the doorway, and then inside the room. My father disliked when I insisted on sharing the room with them, sleeping on a musty straw mattress in the corner. A photo of my great-grandfather, just home from the Civil War, hung with a string and a nail above the bed. The photo scared me sometimes. But upstairs was worse. Fourteen stairs up, turn to the left. The first door to my grandmother’s room, the second door to the extra bedroom where sometimes, if my father complained enough, I would stay with my sister. The bed so high off the floor. The fat metal frame so institutional.
Across the hall was Charlie’s room. My mother confessed to me, years later, that she and her sister once found a photo of a beautiful woman in Charlie’s bureau drawer. They shouldn’t have been snooping. But he was such a mystery. The sweetest man they knew, but also the loneliest. He never shook the demon that haunted him from the time he was eight: talking his sister into hanging a swing from a branch. Pulling the branch low so she could toss the rope over. Letting go of that branch as it snapped back to where it was. The branch smacking against his sister’s face, rendering her sightless from there on out. She went away to the Tennessee School for the Blind, learned trigonometry and Latin. She would use those skills to help her own children with homework. But Charlie would serve penance forever. He dropped out of school at age twelve. Learned to do odd jobs with a hammer. Took care of his sister after her husband died of Typhoid. Listened as she counted her steps so she always knew where she was in the house. Fourteen steps up, three steps to the right.
Eventually, Charlie developed dementia. My mother and her siblings tried to put him in a nursing home. He was supposed to take care of my grandmother, not the other way around. But he wouldn’t stay in his bed and, even at eighty, was still too big and strong for most of the nurses. He walked out of the nursing home one night in pants and a t-shirt, heading for home. He caught pneumonia and died a week later. We made one last trip to the wood frame house. The smell of Charlie’s chewing tobacco had faded. We gathered the photos, quilts and dishes. Ignored the mustiness and dust. Found no picture of a beautiful woman in his bureau. Packed everything away and moved Nanna to live with my aunt where she would begin anew at seventy-five: three steps up, through the door, four steps to the kitchen, turn right, eight steps down the hall, her new bedroom on the left.
Roelina Bosma
Location: Ontario, Canada
About: The first memories I have are from the house we moved into when I was four. The memories are random and scattered but I love most of what I remember of our home before Dad completed a huge renovation on it.
Age: 37
The original Trenton house. Before the remodel. Overstuffed couches. Blue Ziggy wall paper in my and Nate’s bedroom. Our closet that doubled as a “library”. Nate’s child size guitar and my child sized rocking chair. A replica of mom’s adult sized one. Comfort. The red cupboard doors in the bedrooms. Dad’s suitcase of cassette tapes. Dad’s oldies. Mom’s CATS soundtrack. The yellow pitcher we used to rinse our hair in the tub. A silver ring in the tub after rinsing out my Halloween witch hair. Mom and dad’s water bed. Their closet behind the door full of mom’s shoes where I liked to hide and play. The legit saloon doors between the dining room and bedrooms when we first moved in. Sadness when they took them down. A wood stove that burned you if you touched it. The weird blower thing Dad would use to stoke the fire. Ashes on the living room floor.
Plaster swirl on some of the walls. Loving the feel of it. The yellowy stove. My easy bake oven. Burning myself on the element. Nate’s wooden blocks, metal fire truck, and Ghostbuster car. Colouring on mom’s rectangle desk with the rectangle drawer pulls. Watching the Price is Right, then Flintstones, then lunch. Sitting in the old wooden high chair felt like sitting on a throne.
Being elated when I got the doll I so desperately wanted for Christmas. Then being so disappointed after dissolving the bib in boiling water and realizing I got the only one in the collection I didn’t want. The one whose hair “grew” I still played with that doll for years. The dining room we rarely used. That same dining room I came to believe I was stupid when I couldn’t grasp the concept of evaporation at age eight. I may not have understood it, but it was cool to see the ice cubes turn to rain.
The sky light that leaked. Smokey tearing up the house as a puppy. Coming home and pillow innards being everywhere. The sketchy shed in the back yard that we’d climb up the garage door leaning against it to the roof. Nate would continue on to the tree while I stayed on the roof. Our big wheels. Driving them down our short dirt driveway.
Mashed potatoes in a big metal pot. Eating at the small round table in the kitchen most nights. Red Hot hot dog night on Tuesdays. The cut in the wall between the kitchen and the dining room. Reading encyclopedias for fun. Artwork on the fridge. Daisy tied up on a giant tree in the backyard. Her giant brown metal food and water bowls. The tire swing near the stump. The rope of that tire swing snapping when I was on it. The mysterious part of the house we weren’t allowed to go into. Secrets. So many secrets.
