Hometowns

Some thoughts on teaching setting, The Great Gatsby, and writing about where we are from.

I took this photo two years ago on a visit to my hometown of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. This is the view from Two Lights State Park, over near the old gun batteries established during World War II.

It’s been challenging teaching during this time, to say the least, but some things just keep happening and as I teach setting to my students I am thinking of our strange relationship to describing ourselves and others, our landscapes and our histories.

Questions I have more than I want to as I read: Where are we and why? What culture are we in? What is the ethnicity and culture of the narrator, the other characters? I had a student last term in my fiction class exclaim, as we discussed a short story, “Each of these characters is introduced with their ethnicity,” as if it were a shocking discovery. This was Kelly Link’s short story, “Some Zombie Contingency Plans.”

And what is the job being done by the characters? I was watching Severance, like many people, and found it absolutely fascinating if also frustrating to watch people in an office, doing work of an uncertain nature, work known not even to them, and so heinous that the people who do it have to separate their consciousness such that the person they are at work is an entirely different person, different name, different relationships, from the person they are at home. And while I know the show’s omissions around self, setting and work are intentional but it felt almost like a spoof of stories written by many Americans, who are too often loathe to include these specifics in their stories, and I say that as someone who has seen students try to do this for almost 30 years, and who was a student trying to do that before then.

I used to say minimalism was about a status quo, or it required one in order to operate, a place we all know, people we all know. You could hack it by resetting the expectations. The stories where so little is described about the person speaking or the place being spoken of because your inclusion as to the missing subtext is presumed. And then after I read Toni Morrison’s “The Site of Memory,” I understood the work of describing the self and others within their places in history differently. Morrison describes what she calls ‘the discourse that proceeded without us’, and to her mind, the remaining need now for writers in the generations since then is to reveal the suppressed inner life, to describe it, for “any person who is Black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for, historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic.” She saw fiction as her path to do this and it is worth noting, she wrote this essay while writing Beloved.

But in these times we live in now, as we see the current attempts to ban, destroy and erase the histories we have written at great cost over the last century or more, each of us I think is tasked with taking up what we can of what has been destroyed or is about to be destroyed.

I have written here recently about refusing to participate in your own self-erasure and I think that is perhaps a better way to frame it. That the American project of letting go of your history and/or running from it, effectively described and canonized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which celebrated a birthday recently, is still running our lives and our minds, our stories, our culture.

There’s a structure to The Great Gatsby that I think of often because I see it in so many American stories. A story in the present and a story from the past, the same character or characters in each. There’s an identity they are trying to leave behind and outrun. It insists on claiming them, somehow. Gatsby is determined to leave behind who he was in order to be a Successful American and to finally marry Daisy. The past appears as gossip and then stories told by people who show up with this knowledge, and who find Nick, the narrator, if not Gatsby himself. A climax in the past powers a climax in the present and the story resolves around the way the old story and the new story become one story. As I write that it seems to me to be very like the story we are living in now in this country. For all that book is taught, you’d think Americans might have learned we cannot leave the past behind. But here we are.

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An example: the Kdrama Twenty-Five Twenty-One, a romantic comedy with which makes very specific references to history as a matter of course. I found myself amazed and even moved a few years ago as I was making my way through it to realize it was set during the IMF crisis in Korea in the 1990s and shaped by it also, intimately. The story of every character on the show is determined by the crisis, in fact, even though it is not the subject of the show. It is the setting. Baek Yi-jin, for example, is a young man whose father runs away from his debts and leaves the country in secret. Unable to pay for school by himself, he drops out of school. He works several jobs because he cannot finish college and finally is able to get a job as a TV journalist despite the station’s reluctance to hire him. He still has the expensive car his father bought him back when they were an affluent family and it makes him a target, but that is his car. He also works the counter of a comics shop where they rent comic books, a job that puts him right where love interest finds him.

By contrast, at no point in the many years Friends spent on television do you know who is president or what is going on in the country, how they voted, how they are affected by everything from abortion access to healthcare to marriage equality. Everything on that show story-wise is happening just due to their interpersonal dynamics, as if history and politics do not exist.

These are extreme examples but I mean them to be.

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I have been in mind of one of the prompts Annie Dillard had us do when I was her student in literary nonfiction as an undergrad, one I have since expanded on and which I teach often. She had us research our own life, and to begin with the town we grew up in.

You want to write about your life, she said, approximately. How much do you know about your life? Do you know the major industries of your hometown? When was the town settled? Do you know the seasons, the flora and fauna, the population size, the climate, major historical events… on and on she went, rattling off points for us to check. And off we went, to research our hometowns.

We did not know much, we discovered. You grow up somewhere and you may not read the signs you think are for tourists. You consider yourself an expert but you’re just someone who was there.

For myself, I was from a small town in Maine, named Cape Elizabeth, on the southern coast, and I felt I did well enough at the basics without looking: I knew the population was approximately 8,000 at the time I was in college from a sign that used to say such things. I knew there were farms amid suburban stretches, ocean on three sides, two light houses, and abandoned naval installations that I had played inside of as a child. I knew my town was rich, or, parts of it were, and felt that many of the richest families commuted to work in Portland, sometimes Boston. I knew the winter was long, the summer short, and that the ocean once used to freeze, but no longer did. I knew the shallow water lobster had gone extinct, but that residents once could just find them on the beaches. I knew there were seals and dolphins to be seen in Casco Bay, deer in the woods, and lady slipper orchids I used to stalk in the forest.

I did not know the date the land was settled—1627. The Penobscot were there when the first settlers arrived. The town would be incorporated in 1775 and while I knew it was named for a Queen Elizabeth, I was wrong about which one—Elizabeth Stuart, also called Queen of Bohemia, or, Elizabeth of Bohemia, and sometimes, The Winter Queen. I did not know the lighthouses had been set there in part because of the many shipwrecks, nor did I know the industry—farming was the answer, three major farms, owned by three families, for quite some time, a kind of wealth hidden in plain sight. Also tourism—visitors to the beaches, and the two lighthouses. I knew there was a lighthouse museum at one of the lighthouses, and that I had visited the relics there, where I learned first what scrimshaw was, from the relics from the shipwrecks, brought to shore by citizens who would go out on long lines attached to the land to bring back what they could from the dangerous surf. That was an older industry for some of the town’s first settlers. The town’s website marks 77 known shipwrecks.¹

What I learned explained a great deal of what had always been a little mysterious to me about the area: the whole town had always had the feeling of farms left on an abandoned station, deep underneath the pleasant suburban surface.

This was an important early lesson for me as a writer: You know the least about your life precisely because, for living in it, you might barely notice the details, or push into the history. And even if your family or friends tell you stories of the past, you might never fact-check it.

You are from a place and you believe you know it, but your memories are not just unreliable, they are full of research holes. I eventually returned to this lesson with my first novel, Edinburgh, for example, set partly in my home town, and inspired partly by events from my own life. I was trying to describe a landscape, and remembered there was a red wildflower that I loved in summer. I wrote “red wildflower” on the page and stopped.

I called my mother. She knew the flower as the Devil’s Paintbrush. Much better than “red flower”.

Without this kind of research, we are the hometowns we don’t know, the “red flower” in our own landscape. Turn that attention to yourself. Research yourself. Where were you born? Why? What were your parents doing at the time? Can you fact-check the family story, the family immigration story too? What records are there of it? What are the stories they always tell? Can you interview those who know you or knew you as to what they remember? Is there any documentation? Old letters, old photos, court records. What was in the newspapers at the time you were born? What are your major industries? What is your local population—how many people have you been as you tried to be you, and how many are you? Who are you named after, if anyone, and why? What laws might have shaped you and your family that you never understood, until you took the time to find this out? You don’t have to do it all at once, but you could.

And once you know all of this, what do you think you can write that you couldn’t write before?

Until next time,

Alexander Chee

1. I was very happy to learn tonight, while checking back over these facts, that Wikipedia lists one of my favorite writers as a notable person from this town: Joy Williams. I look forward to asking her about it whenever I see her next.