Such wonderful advice! I would like to add a suggestion that this work, which every writer should do, can be expanded to find the links between your hometown and other places you have lived. For someone like me, who lived in four towns in Iowa growing up and then moved to Milwaukee and Chicago and Minneapolis, all before I was 25, the notion you should have a hometown makes me feel splintered. I’m a journalist with 40 years international experience so I’m certainly used to researching stories, their backgrounds, their settings, but normally related to events in other people’s lives.
The richest and personally most rewarding research work I have done was for my first novel, the rough draft of which I’ve just completed at age 74 (now madly revising). It’s a historical crime novel that takes place in the Midwest in the US. I originally set it in a small town near Chicago so that I could also use the city as a setting. But something made me send the characters to Iowa and soon they were in different towns in Iowa - surprise surprise these were the towns where I grew up - and I needed to research the history of those towns. The things I learned astonished me, and the towns began to look like beads on a necklace, for they were all of course linked, often in startling ways. I lived in Cedar Rapids for my high school years, had access to a car and spent time out of school mostly driving up and down first Avenue looking for cute boys with my pals. I never knew that Quaker Oats, the town’s biggest employer at the time, had had a massive fire 60 years earlier. One result of that fire was tighter security regulations for factories throughout the state. That led to confrontations between labor groups and company owners elsewhere. The lives and economics of the parents of my friends and most of the cute boys we found were profoundly affected by those earlier events. As I revise, and I consider my characters and whether or not they are fully developed, I’ve been helped by imagining the backdrop, what the towns looked like and what the factories looked like, and whether or not the rivers were flooding. How did this affect their lives and their outlook on life a man who comes down with the Spanish flu in 1918 because sanitary conditions at a meat packing plant were not great, can easily be soured by realizing how easy it was for the owners to leave town, but not the workers.
This kind of research rekindles any lagging enthusiasm mid-stream in writing a novel and it’s also a wonderful source of ideas for a writer.
I still have trouble with the idea of “hometown“ although I could listen to Bruce Springsteen sing his song about it over and over. Maybe the lack of one is part of what makes some of us feel like outsiders all our lives, and maybe that’s part of what drives us to write. Whether you have one or not, the role of it, its presence or absence (if you have one, you can write about the loss of it, but if you do not you can’t and that might give you your unique perspective on it) is good cause for research.
I’ve been wrestling with the questions you explore here. Thank you. Lovely sentences, heartbreaking climate reality: “I knew the winter was long, the summer short, and that the ocean once used to freeze, but no longer did.”
"When are we?"(Age/life stage of persona and time frame/period) &"Where are we?: Two questions I ask most in the margins of drafts, along with asking about the "when" of the persona in relation to the event of the writing—how long has it been?
Thank you for this—it's really helpful, and I'll pass it along (giving you credit, of course). I just finished teaching a grad class, "On Persona," and your post creates so many more possibilities for creating nuances and depth in establishing persona in relation to place/time. Thank you.
“I could spend hours trying to write [my childhood home] as it should be written, in order to give the feeling which is even at this moment very strong in me. But I should fail (unless I had some wonderful luck); I dare say I should only succeed in having the luck if I had begun by describing Virginia herself. Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. Who was I then?” — Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past"
I took a class with T Kira Mahealani Madden a few years ago and we made maps of our towns or neighborhoods including personal landmarks like “where I fell off my scooter and skinned my knees” or “where the poodle with one eye lived” etc. This was an exercise in memory, but also in connection to places we might not ever have explored.
Thank you. My current project is a memoir and this reminds me to dig deeper into the details of settings. It feels like it needs these extra layers to bring richness.
Thank you for showing up for the things that just keep happening and for your beautiful words, always
And thank you for reminders of our royalty- Toni Morrison, Annie Dillard, Kelly Link.
Also, I’ve long thought of and read Gatsby as a tragedy about class and capitalism, about how we are bidden to abandon ourselves in a desperate quest to be as much as possible like people who will never accept us, no matter how wildly successful we are, even on the very terms that they set.
We read your essay on Cape Elizabeth for a writing class focused on the power of research in memoir. Thank you for going even further here - to challenge us to think of ourselves as our own hometown! For immigrants and nomads , we are often our only hometown, but that doesn’t mean we know our own histories … at all!
Love this. So much here to highlight and keep close, esp this: "...each of us I think is tasked with taking up what we can of what has been destroyed or is about to be destroyed." Thank you, Alexander!
Because I was adopted at age five, I had many memories, but needed to fully contextualize them to understand my story. Maybe this is, in part, how I started writing. Left with questions - about my birth parents, the country where I was born and lived until I came to the United States, the events leading to my adoption - (I felt) I had no choice but to investigate.
This is nothing to say of intersectionality. I am also the only brown girl in my white family and the youngest child, an adopted daughter in a family with three biological sons.
There is layer upon layer of context from which to understand my story, or at least parts of it: the Iran Iraq War, the Fall of the Soviet Union, the migration of Muslim populations and Islamaphobia in Europe, Bulgarian social and political history in the late 80s/early 90s, International Adoption Law and human trafficking. Some years later, there is Abercrombie & Fitch, 9/11, The Invasion of Iraq, the public frenzy around underage girls like the Olsen Twins circa 2005, and What Would Tyler Durden Do.
I don't think a story can be complete without context and as far as personal history goes (and the writing of it), I think this is why the subjects of memory and truth and authenticity are so interesting. While context isn't relative, meaning is, and there seems to be greater ambivalence for those with more privilege, as to what meaning is made (whether in storytelling or truth telling). But I also think context can be an antidote to ambivalence. Which is why it's so important (and threatening?) to tell stories.
I loved this post. I'm glad I saved it. I knew it would be good.
Such wonderful advice! I would like to add a suggestion that this work, which every writer should do, can be expanded to find the links between your hometown and other places you have lived. For someone like me, who lived in four towns in Iowa growing up and then moved to Milwaukee and Chicago and Minneapolis, all before I was 25, the notion you should have a hometown makes me feel splintered. I’m a journalist with 40 years international experience so I’m certainly used to researching stories, their backgrounds, their settings, but normally related to events in other people’s lives.
The richest and personally most rewarding research work I have done was for my first novel, the rough draft of which I’ve just completed at age 74 (now madly revising). It’s a historical crime novel that takes place in the Midwest in the US. I originally set it in a small town near Chicago so that I could also use the city as a setting. But something made me send the characters to Iowa and soon they were in different towns in Iowa - surprise surprise these were the towns where I grew up - and I needed to research the history of those towns. The things I learned astonished me, and the towns began to look like beads on a necklace, for they were all of course linked, often in startling ways. I lived in Cedar Rapids for my high school years, had access to a car and spent time out of school mostly driving up and down first Avenue looking for cute boys with my pals. I never knew that Quaker Oats, the town’s biggest employer at the time, had had a massive fire 60 years earlier. One result of that fire was tighter security regulations for factories throughout the state. That led to confrontations between labor groups and company owners elsewhere. The lives and economics of the parents of my friends and most of the cute boys we found were profoundly affected by those earlier events. As I revise, and I consider my characters and whether or not they are fully developed, I’ve been helped by imagining the backdrop, what the towns looked like and what the factories looked like, and whether or not the rivers were flooding. How did this affect their lives and their outlook on life a man who comes down with the Spanish flu in 1918 because sanitary conditions at a meat packing plant were not great, can easily be soured by realizing how easy it was for the owners to leave town, but not the workers.
This kind of research rekindles any lagging enthusiasm mid-stream in writing a novel and it’s also a wonderful source of ideas for a writer.
I still have trouble with the idea of “hometown“ although I could listen to Bruce Springsteen sing his song about it over and over. Maybe the lack of one is part of what makes some of us feel like outsiders all our lives, and maybe that’s part of what drives us to write. Whether you have one or not, the role of it, its presence or absence (if you have one, you can write about the loss of it, but if you do not you can’t and that might give you your unique perspective on it) is good cause for research.
I’ve been wrestling with the questions you explore here. Thank you. Lovely sentences, heartbreaking climate reality: “I knew the winter was long, the summer short, and that the ocean once used to freeze, but no longer did.”
Thanks Luis!
"When are we?"(Age/life stage of persona and time frame/period) &"Where are we?: Two questions I ask most in the margins of drafts, along with asking about the "when" of the persona in relation to the event of the writing—how long has it been?
Thank you for this—it's really helpful, and I'll pass it along (giving you credit, of course). I just finished teaching a grad class, "On Persona," and your post creates so many more possibilities for creating nuances and depth in establishing persona in relation to place/time. Thank you.
“I could spend hours trying to write [my childhood home] as it should be written, in order to give the feeling which is even at this moment very strong in me. But I should fail (unless I had some wonderful luck); I dare say I should only succeed in having the luck if I had begun by describing Virginia herself. Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. Who was I then?” — Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past"
Oh thank you. And I love this Woolf quote. Who was I then is such a great way to say it.
I took a class with T Kira Mahealani Madden a few years ago and we made maps of our towns or neighborhoods including personal landmarks like “where I fell off my scooter and skinned my knees” or “where the poodle with one eye lived” etc. This was an exercise in memory, but also in connection to places we might not ever have explored.
As always, I’m so thankful for you.
Thanks so much. I love this idea of the personal map.
Thank you so much for this. I share a hometown with Annie Dillard, so her descriptions of Pittsburgh will always inspire me —
“The city poured rolling down the mountain valley like slag.”
Thank you. My current project is a memoir and this reminds me to dig deeper into the details of settings. It feels like it needs these extra layers to bring richness.
Love this! Reminds me of the anecdotes I discovered in my great-grandfather’s memoir about his friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. check it out:
https://thesecretingredient.substack.com/p/what-my-great-grandfathers-memoir
Thank you for showing up for the things that just keep happening and for your beautiful words, always
And thank you for reminders of our royalty- Toni Morrison, Annie Dillard, Kelly Link.
Also, I’ve long thought of and read Gatsby as a tragedy about class and capitalism, about how we are bidden to abandon ourselves in a desperate quest to be as much as possible like people who will never accept us, no matter how wildly successful we are, even on the very terms that they set.
Thanks so much. A pleasure.
Great reminder about the holes in our memory and what we think we know but don’t
Thanks. It’s a funny thing, to live in our own blind spots.
We read your essay on Cape Elizabeth for a writing class focused on the power of research in memoir. Thank you for going even further here - to challenge us to think of ourselves as our own hometown! For immigrants and nomads , we are often our only hometown, but that doesn’t mean we know our own histories … at all!
Indeed. My pleasure, thanks for reading.
Love this. So much here to highlight and keep close, esp this: "...each of us I think is tasked with taking up what we can of what has been destroyed or is about to be destroyed." Thank you, Alexander!
Because I was adopted at age five, I had many memories, but needed to fully contextualize them to understand my story. Maybe this is, in part, how I started writing. Left with questions - about my birth parents, the country where I was born and lived until I came to the United States, the events leading to my adoption - (I felt) I had no choice but to investigate.
This is nothing to say of intersectionality. I am also the only brown girl in my white family and the youngest child, an adopted daughter in a family with three biological sons.
There is layer upon layer of context from which to understand my story, or at least parts of it: the Iran Iraq War, the Fall of the Soviet Union, the migration of Muslim populations and Islamaphobia in Europe, Bulgarian social and political history in the late 80s/early 90s, International Adoption Law and human trafficking. Some years later, there is Abercrombie & Fitch, 9/11, The Invasion of Iraq, the public frenzy around underage girls like the Olsen Twins circa 2005, and What Would Tyler Durden Do.
I don't think a story can be complete without context and as far as personal history goes (and the writing of it), I think this is why the subjects of memory and truth and authenticity are so interesting. While context isn't relative, meaning is, and there seems to be greater ambivalence for those with more privilege, as to what meaning is made (whether in storytelling or truth telling). But I also think context can be an antidote to ambivalence. Which is why it's so important (and threatening?) to tell stories.
I loved this post. I'm glad I saved it. I knew it would be good.
Thank you. Thanks for this thoughtful comment. I especially like this idea of context as an antidote.
Just as I sat pondering how much to say, what would matter, this arrives and now I need not wonder. Brilliantly helpful, precisely needed. Thank you.
I do like to be timely. Good luck with the work.