Im/placed: Walking to work

Saturday, May 3, 2008

Walking to work

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One of the ways I know my neighborhood is by walking to work. I live less than two miles from my office. It is a pleasant walk: along tree-shaded streets and paths, past old houses with wide porches, beside two creeks and a small marsh with birds, such as kingfishers, and turtles and frogs, and finally across a flowered campus. The entire stretch is now in blossom, with splashes of pink and purple and yellow and red accenting a dozen shades of green. There is plenty to learn about my home town; that it is also beautiful makes me feel glad.

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Im/placed

The title is a displacement of the word "emplaced." It seems to me there ought to be something active about our placement as human beings. We are not (or should not be) emplaced as an urn is placed in a niche. We are in place as agents. In some sense we place ourselves. In another we create the places we inhabit. In yet another the places we inhabit create us. Our relationship with place and space is complex and contradictory: hence, "Im/placed."

My writing - as all writing - plays the edge of fiction and nonfiction, truth and invention. Some postings are excerpts from The Names of Things, a novel, and are labeled as such. Postings under "The Folklorist" heading are snippets from a novel in process. Otherwise, the words here reflect day-to-day experience and reflection. In all cases it aims to get things right.