I’ve been lugging around a memoir about my father’s death for some fifteen, er, twenty years now. I used to think it was in pretty good shape, but I’ve come to realize how much work it needs to go beyond being a sweet story about a middle-aged woman losing the first man she adored. The old personal-universal conundrum. I at least want it to be broader than one sad daughter surviving her grief and going on to meet another man she could adore: the one she married when she was six weeks shy of her forty-first birthday, some two years after burying her father in St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford, Mississippi.

Yes, it’s my first marriage.

One of the ways I’m going to rework the manuscript is by paying more attention to scene setting. Most of the action occurs throughout Mississippi, with stops in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina; Fort Morgan, Alabama; Richmond, Indiana; and Chautauqua, New York. I’m familiar enough with those particular environments that I forgot readers won’t necessarily be right alongside me. I made assumptions with abandon, glossed over facets that need to be detailed, and referred only in passing to historical happenings if I noted them at all. I tossed around neighborhoods and restaurants, street names and landmarks, without much concern for whether readers would catch on. Funny, that, as one thing that bugs me when I read British mysteries, for example, is that I sometimes feel I need a key in the back of the book to understand some of the phrasings and references.

In my writing workshops, many times I’ll focus on a theme or approach that I’m curious about myself. So, in April my Fellow Pilgrims and I read about, learned about, and wrote about place. As it was Earth Day, we also spent time trying out ways we might use nature as a character to go beyond merely noting the weather.

By the end of our time together we had written haikus about trees, relied on nature to prompt childhood memories (wait until you hear the one about my sister driving our parents’ blue Delta 88 into a magnolia tree in the backyard), and committed to going deeper when it comes to setting scenes in our work, regardless of genre. 

Here are the resources we used:

• Writing from the Senses
• Henry Carlile’s “Nature”
• Denise Levertov’s “In California”
• Scottish Book Trust Article on Writing Sense of Place
• Jericho Writers Article on Writing Sense of Place
• Writer’s Digest Article on Writing Sense of Place 
• Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree
• The Creative Act: A Way of Being
• And this came to my email inbox shortly after we met: Ross Gay on Trees

Let us know if you have other resources to recommend and/or if you’d like to share how you handle place in your writing.

Looking forward,

Amy-Lyles