A Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams

2002

Keith Basso writes, "Anthropologists have paid scant attention to one of the most basic dimensions of human experience-that close companion of heart and mind. .. that is known as sense of place" (199654, emphasis in original). Basso examines the connectedness of the Western Apache with their landscape; in this work, we examine the creation of a connection to place through family narratives. We follow the thread of stories told in our two families about coming to Atlanta, about the attempts to make a home in a strange place. Our focus is on the power of narrative to recollect the placed-ness of the past, to story the poignant and the humorous, and to make the strange familiar. This is, then, a close look at the "lived relationships" that families establish with places (Basso 199654). The storying of the past is part of what Edward Casey calls "emplacement," or what we might rephrase as a planting of selflfamily in place. Because our experiences of place are tied to a nexus of social and emotional relationships, these "emplacement" narratives are not solitary adventures. Rather, they are about connecting with people. "For the most part," as Casey writes, "we get into places together. We partake of places in common-and reshape them in common" (1993: 16). We add that family narratives allow for this reshaping of a strange place into a place called home. In his "Wild Life, Authenticity and the Human Experience of 'Natural' Places," Gary Alan Fine writes of the Unzwelt, "the ultimate reality of place": "Although the interpretive significance of place does not derive from.. . location as a physical space, meaning does become attached to place so strongly that it becomes firmly linked and

. Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism, 1(1), 71-79., 2021

According to storyteller and medical sociologist Arthur Frank stories “enact realities: they bring into being what was not there before” (Frank 2010, 75); they become lives, the lives of places and all that inhabits those places, capable of constituting conditions for either enriching or diminishing those lives. By inflicting themselves on places, their inhabitants, stories can limit or liberate them “according to whatever imagination the stories make available” (Frank 2012, 49): subject, object, subaltern, elite–all can be created, positioned, and “revision[ed]” (Richardson 1997, 299) by the story told. The story of terra nullius, for example, created and propagated by the settler colonizers and colonials of Australia by storifying matter as commodity there for the taking, uninhabited and ownerless as the story goes, enacted a reality of dispossession and established a hegemony of white Anglo male with all else ‘othered’, their stories pathologized, colonized. However the reverse is also true: realities can enact stories, stories that when not silenced allow the ‘other’ to be heard, to be seen. These are stories that make visible (and compelling) the invisible–the links between place and inhabitant (Gruenewald 2003). Yet to decolonialize a story, reconfigure the story as one where subaltern has the potential to become a part of the subject (Barad 2007) with agency, within the context of the story told, can be (as in the case of Australia) a “narrative struggle” (Collins-Gearing and Osland 2010, para. 10) for the ‘othered’. For place that had once been hospitable to its inhabitants–home–has been rendered inhospitable by the colonizers’ stories, limiting ‘others’ to the margins of colonial life: liminal spaces–“a borderland . . . a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (Anzaldúa,1987, 3)–where imaginary resources with which to contest those myths of colonization are scarce (Fricker 2007), if existent at all.

Western American Literature, 2002

Paul Ricoeur argues that there is a certain reciprocal relation between our experiences of lived time and of narrative, writing “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (p. 52). In this essay, I draw on Ricoeur’s analysis of the relation between time and narrative in order to discover the way in which our lived experiences of place can affect our narratives of place, and vice versa. I conclude by drawing on Scott McClannahan’s Crappalachia, in order to see how the narrative of a place grows out of experiences of that place across time. Although, Ricoeur argues, there is a pre-narrative quality to human life itself, a narrative is required to synthesize these many different heterogeneous elements into a coherent whole. As narratives are created, we draw not only on the pre-narrative character of life, but also on larger social and historical narratives. Just as it is true that it is through the historical, fictional, sociological, and artistic stories we tell about Appalachia that we understand the character of the place, it is through our lived experiences of this place that we gain these narratives. And just as the narrative draws on our lived experiences to be created, there is a sort of pseudo-experience which takes place whenever one understands and interprets a narrative.

Much attention has been paid to the pastoral, and to writing the city respectively. These preoccupations with city and country share a focus on ways of seeing, and modalities of being, that construct and are constructed by urban or rural environments. It is probable that less attention has been paid to literary spaces in which city and nature interpenetrate to form zones of instability. I locate such zones primarily in urban/rural seams which are given shape (or made shapeless) by a secondary set of binaries related to power and gender, order and chaos, linear versus narrative time, and organic versus mechanistic worldviews. I theorise my argument further through the figure of the flâneur as construed by Baudelaire and by Walter Benjamin, and through the hybrid genre of urban pastoral. In this paper I consider such zones of instability in "Phosphorescence" and "The Keeper," short stories by Diane Awerbuck (2011), and in the novel Nineveh (2011) by Henrietta Rose-Innes.