The Spirit of Place

Years ago, regional writers used to talk about the "spirit of place" and how it informed their work. I came of age as a writer in the midst of that conversation, which has continued to influence my thinking about the arts. I spent most of my life in Alaska, so the "place" I considered was the subarctic, the taiga region where the northern forest meets the tundra. I remember many bitter conversations with other writers there about how writers from New York were imagined as writing about life, while we were supposed to write about moose. Now I love moose as much as the next person, but moose are oddities, queer unlikely beings, to someone who sees pavement as normal. How could one capture that "spirit of place" so the New Yorker (person and publication) might hear our voices?

Lately I have begun to revisit the idea of "spirit of place." Having just read Jennifer Larson's fabulous book, "Greek Nymphs," which deals with the way ancient Greeks saw places as being literally spirit-filled, each having its own nymph, I wonder if the spirits in question are not merely aesthetic constructs but something resembling semidivine beings.

Places speak, if we listen. The voice of a bog seems dramatically different than the sound of a mountain. But what is speaking? Perhaps the joined breaths of all the beings that live in that place: sparrows, little rabbits, worms, deer, raccoons. All breathing out and breathing in, and the plants breathing in reverse, filling the air with oxygen as they respire, slowly in winter, pantingly fast in bright summer. Oaks, goldenrod, morels, blackberries. In another place, lichen and crows, heather and otters. Each place a unique community, tied by breath in space.

In our endangered world, place seems no longer a regional literary concept, a matter for discussion among those whose poems are peopled by moose rather than pigeons. Describing the hallowed sense of place was part of the craft of storytellers from the earliest human times. We need to now recover that simple craft and tell again the stories of the many precious places we know.