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The Importance of Place Lisa Albers talks with prominent local authors about their writing by Lisa Albers

For this final installment in Seattle Woman's series on local writers, I asked several people in the writing community to name the best women writers in the literary category. The recommenders were Chris Higashi, who coordinates readings and discussion groups for the Central Library; Seattle literary agent Elizabeth Wales; and the knowledgeable crew at Elliott Bay Book Company. Three names appeared on all of their lists: Kathleen Alcalá, Stephanie Kallos and Nancy Rawles. One theme emerged in common across their work: place. Here, they discuss how geography, landscape and the idea of home influence their writing.

Kathleen Alcalá

Lisa Albers: In the title essay in your collection, The Desert Remembers My Name, you talk about the amazing place of the desert, which was once the floor of a sea and was also once the place of your ancestors. What does place mean to you?

Kathleen Alcalá: Well, it's funny because I've lived in the Northwest for more than 20 years, but I mostly write about the Southwest, so I guess I'm desert haunted. Time and place are fluid across distances. When I'm in the Southwest, I think about the history of my people.

LA: How do you see it permeating your writing?

KA: I think it colors everything else that I'm thinking about and writing about and talking about. About three years ago, I taught for a semester in New Mexico, starting in January when everything looks dead because it's gray. Then I realized everything is alive; in the spring, colors burst out from that muted palette. My mental understanding of colors has shifted living here in the Northwest because everything is a continuous green all of the time.

LA: Is place also a character for you? A desert that remembers....

KA: Landscape definitely is in my writing. That's true for many Western writers. When I've read some contemporary literature from the East, I've found myself asking: Who are all these people? How are you supposed to keep them straight? Then I realize that there are only two or three characters. All the other people are the 'landscape,' a different kind of landscape.

LA: I'm struck in particular by the story of the Opata people, who once numbered 60,000 but now are hard for you to find. What happens when the place bears little trace of the people who once lived there?

KA: Since I wrote that book, I've made connections with other Opata people. Now we're kind of all over. We have a chat group, and people check in frequently. If nothing's going on, they'll post a language lesson. Two live in Washington state, and we talk about getting together.

LA: By acknowledging the absence, you gained a presence.

KA: Yes; it's really been gratifying.

LA: You are a fiction writer who also writes essays. What is the 'place' of fiction, and what is the 'place' of essay? In your life, in literature?

KA: I think that fiction has given me the freedom to take family stories and give them a narrative thread that doesn't exist in real life, and I encourage my students to do that. When they begin, they get bogged down in the necessity to get it right or to protect people. In fiction, you can create a beginning and end and better dialogue. We crave that; we love to tell stories. Coming back to writing essays was also a way to confirm stories that I grew up with and do the research on them and make that available to other people who have those common experiences with me.

LA: There is also the notion of architecture and space. You said, "Architectural space in Mexico reflects the public and private lives of people." In another essay, you celebrate a town's decision not to install a cable car to take people to the top of a pyramid. What for you is the right relationship between the natural place and the built space that humans inhabit?

KA: I think it's okay for humans to delineate the space they live in, but what's happened has to do with the notion of public vs. private space. Here, we have yards around the outside of our houses; they are public spaces. In Mexico, the yard is in the interior and is a wonderful space to invite people into. When I talk about Chihuahua, I associate the architecture with my memories of that place.

Nancy Rawles

Lisa Albers: Most people might think of slaves as having been stationary, living out their lives on one plantation. In My Jim, they are bought and sold several times, moved from one plantation to another, or they must move when their owners move. Why is place an important aspect of this story?

Nancy Rawles: As a young girl, Sadie, the main character in My Jim, is taken from Virginia to the frontier lands in Missouri. Jefferson purchases the Louisiana Territory in 1803, which doubled the size of the United States. Settlers are flocking west to stake land claims, and generations of extended slave families in places like Virginia and South Carolina are broken apart in this massive migration west. The period from 1810 until the end of the Civil War is a period of enormous displacement. I think it’s important to recognize people who are enslaved as continually being dispossessed. They have no control over where they are taken. Place becomes enormously important because their lives are not settled.

LA: There's also the idea of the setting in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn being part of the story. How did Mark Twain deal with the landscape of Missouri and the middle south, and how did you deal with it? Where do you overlap, where do you push against his depiction?

NR: In Huck Finn, the Mississippi River represents freedom. Samuel Clemens celebrated the river that played such an important role in his life. The river had many meanings for the slaves in Hannibal, Missouri. It was a wild river then, very powerful and difficult to swim or raft across. The free state of Illinois lay across the river, and slaves that managed to reach safety there had the chance to rebuild their lives with help from abolitionists. So, on the one hand, the river beckoned. Looking at the river and dreaming of freedom may have served a captive people in the same way gazing out at the Atlantic may have fostered longing in earlier generations of West Africans who lived their lives on the Eastern seaboard. The river was also a place of drowning. Slaves knew of people who had drowned trying to escape or who had jumped into the river or been thrown overboard from the steamboats that transported them in chains. Slaves also worked the riverfront. In the years leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists plied the riverfront, too. So, the river represented hope.

LA: For a human being who is owned by another human being, what does place mean?

NR: I am captive. There is no place for me. I am out of context and without. I cannot get to my place of freedom. I must locate my freedom in the shifting space of a song or in my love for the natural world or in the words of the slaves of old spoken in the Bible. I must locate my freedom in the people who see me and know me and love me. I am owned but I own nothing. I want to own myself. I want to become a person who cannot be owned. I want a place of my own.

LA: There is also the notion of displacement, as in Africans displaced from their homeland. How are your characters haunted by the place they or their ancestors were stolen from?

NR: Place inhabits us in ways we don’t know. We remember places we’ve never been; when we see them, we recognize them. Memories are handed down in possessions and stories and in our very bones. Language evokes place. Rhythm evokes place.

Stephanie Kallos

Lisa Albers: One of the heroes in your book is also a place: Seattle. Why set the book here, and in such a literal way? Other writers create fictitious settings.

Stephanie Kallos: I think place became important in Broken for You after the fact; I did not begin with that intention. I'm a character-driven writer, but then these places began to crop up, like Greenwood, like Margaret's house. I asked myself: Does the setting need to be anonymous? I at one point began to think it needed to be set in Seattle, and so you have, for instance, a section about geography in Seattle versus geography in the Midwest. The city progressed in a mosaic fashion, which suited my theme. I fell in love with the landscape, and that reinforced the themes of Broken for You. Seattle nudged its way into the book.

LA: Your characters move from place to place, searching for each other. The person they think they're looking for isn't the one they're meant to find. Place draws people together. Why is place so important?

SK: Margaret is connected to old wealth from the turn of the last century. She'd been here a long time, but other characters come for various reasons; either they're left behind or they're deciding to stay. Different forces come together to build this strange family.

LA: How have readers responded to the literal descriptions of places they know well, especially neighborhoods like Greenwood Avenue?

SK: I received an e-mail about the intersection 85th and Greenwood. This reader sent me a link and asked whether or not I knew that there used to be a graveyard there. She asked me if that was why I chose it for the car crash scene. It wasn't; I had no idea there was a graveyard there once.

LA: I'm interested in the importance of micro-places: the Orleans Hotel, Aloha Lanes. What do these spaces mean for your characters? For you?

SK: As I started writing about a bowling alley falling on hard times, I interviewed the manager of a local bowling alley, and he told me these great stories about people. There used to be a child care center there; the place was a great economic leveler for the community; everyone went bowling. I really wanted the love story to unfold in a place where it sounded like things were breaking. The sounds are incredibly wonderful. On one of my favorite mornings during my research, I went over there very early, and there were very few people there, and one was this couple in their 80s. They moved carefully and slowly. They were all dressed up, and they were bowling, and one would get a strike, and the other would clap.

LA: Is the body also a place?

SK: That evolved as I wrote. Your body is where you live. How you feel about it affects you.

LA: Which writers capture place very well—any of your chief influences?

SK: Jane Smiley in A Thousand Acres writes about the Midwest with a gorgeous perspective of the farming community. I also think of Anne Tyler's depictions of Baltimore, the way she captures a small town within big cities. I was very aware of it in New York. Neighborhoods have their own identities. I admire the invisibility of her craft in The Accidental Tourist. With some writers, I'm very aware of their craft and how smart they are. She's a brilliant person but never makes me feel it.

Lisa Albers is a freelance writer and poet who lives in Seattle.

©2008 Caliope Publishing Company