Place is so much more than a location. Place includes the inhabitants - and yes - the events that are precipitated by the cultural structures and strictures of place.
Plot flows organically from place in good fiction. And it seems a paradox that every ‘place’ in fiction is generated by the writer’s creative efforts to draw fine lines of descriptions with words that reveal the unique ‘place pressures’ that cause people to do what they do. And yet, part of the effect of that process requires that the experience will ultimately connect to ordinary and extra-ordinary common events of human lives.
The writer’s descriptions of sense impressions that are specific – never generic – to a particular place, takes a place, even an imaginary place, and renders it so real a reader can, not only see it, but also feel it, smell it, hear it, touch it and come away carrying that experience.
After having been fully engaged by Compton’s fictional stories, I believe in the world he’s constructed. For a writer to write successfully about place in this deeper way, such a writer must find and notice what a particular character in that particular place would notice, and yet not notice, because that feature has always been there. It’s what the character knows and sees and feels and smells and touches daily. Perhaps one way to think of it – at least for me – is to say it is the ‘there and the not there.’ Yes. This does sound a bit like I’m channeling Gertrude Stein. But I’m talking about characters’ ‘in-the-moment’ process of living a life that adds depth to a writer’s work.
I believe in the quiet desperation of people of Compton’s world, living in despair, but with dignity and grace, in spite of grinding poverty. I taste the grit of coal dust coating Kentucky mining communities. I smell and hear the local train hauling away slag and debris. I see mighty trucks driven by thick-handed men roaring down steep mountainous roads, hauling ass and coal. I hear the chronic wheezing of black lung disease in gnarly men bent over cups of thick coffee in a diner. I smell the oily sickness of it all, and although I find myself somewhat reluctant to do this kind of feeling, I did feel it.
Now it is as if I’ve visited another country. I know things now – at an intuitive level – gut level, if you will, that I’ve previously known mostly at an intellectual level. And isn’t that what fiction that marks us with the unique, organic qualities of place can do? Yes. I believe that is exactly what good fiction should do.
Interview by: Jan Bowman - August 7, 2012
Jan Bowman’s work has
appeared in Roanoke Review, Big Muddy,
Broadkill Review, Trajectory, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato
Eyes, and others. She won the 2012
Roanoke Review Prize for Fiction. Her
stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories
and a story was a finalist in the “So To
Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two
collections of short stories and currently shopping for a publisher for a
completed story collection. She has nonfiction work pending publication in Spring
2013 Issues of Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of
“Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and
publishers. Learn more at:
Website – www.janbowmanwriter.com
Blogsite – http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com
Thanks for talking with me, Jan. I preciate it greatly!
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