Evoking Place when Writing

I’m reading Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece right now. It’s a new release, and I can’t resist shiny new objects even though I have a ridiculously long TBR. I also got to see Lisa Ko speak around 2018 or so when I was in college and read her debut The Leavers (the first two chapters in class, because my professor was on a committee that gave her an award and was promoting her talk, and then later finished the signed copy I bought that day around 2019). Plus, it’s AAPI month, so that was the deciding factor for me when choosing which adult book I wanted to sink my teeth in.

The story begins in Northern New Jersey, the exact area I live now, albeit in the 80s and 90s. (The narrative continues all the way into the 2040s.) The town the main character grows up in is fictional (“Millwood”…my partner thinks it’s just Ridgewood), but everything else mentioned isn’t. And I felt that specificity. Sure, there were a few things I raised an eyebrow about (Garden State Plaza and Paramus Park are not 20 minutes away from each other??)

I’ve been thinking about specificity of setting and place over the past couple of years because of my partner, Taylor Tracy. I just reread her debut novel-in-verse, Murray out of Water (now in its final form! you can preorder and get goodies!), which comes out May 21, and just being around her writing process for so long—and her for so long—has emphasized the importance of place. Her books have specific settings, usually in New Jersey and the Jersey Shore, and references and details about those places down to restaurants and schools. She tells me all these stories as we travel this area she grew up in each day, and we research the places we travel. I feel like with her, I am becoming more and more aware of the world around me.

I have not been very good at anchoring my writing in specific places.

Admittedly, I did start out writing portal fantasies. But I’ve been writing contemporary as an adult, and all my projects are set in Indiana so far, but I’ve avoided the specifics. None of them are set in Terre Haute or Evansville, where I grew up, or the smaller towns were I’ve lived (Bloomington and Madison). Not specifically, at least. I shy away from it. While my main WIP is basically set at my former high school, in terms of how it operates and the pressures placed on students, I know it can’t be the exact same because it is not particularly positive and I’m sure there could be legal issues. Still, I haven’t really fleshed out the school or the town. I haven’t named either (I frequently use X as a placeholder in my writing for names I haven’t decided on). There is a fuzzy vagueness around place in my writing.

Tay has such a deep connection to specific places here where she grew up, and while I have enjoyed sharing Indiana with her on our trips back…it’s different. My memories of where I grew up, the towns of Terre Haute and Evansville, are not particularly anchored in place. I have fondness and images of backyard pools and swings, school, bowling alleys…but not much connected to the specific town or outdoor spaces. Nothing is as rich to me as the woods around my grandparents’ house in upstate New York, for example. I did miss Terre Haute very much when we moved to Evansville when I was 12, but my memories of traversing both places are from the passenger or back seat of a car. There is something removed about that. Something that feels ordinary. Even if some of those ordinary things, like the local Menard’s or Rural King, were regional specific that would be a nice detail to drop into a novel.

I think this is because back then, I didn’t do a lot of exploring on my own. I was kind of sheltered, often by choice. I did not get my license until I was 21. In high school, many of my friends lived 40 minutes away, many in a suburb. When we drove, my nose was often in a book in the passenger seat. I was always internally narrating my life and imagining sharing it with others. What I mean is, I was not the most observant. I did not stop much to appreciate nature. I did not get to explore my local haunts on my own terms. I was dealing with a lot of internal emotions instead.

Terre Haute and Evansville also do not (or do not at the time) have much of a walkable downtown that felt like a place to hang out. Especially not like Bloomington and Madison, where I went to college and then moved after, respectively. Those were places I got to explore on my own terms. I had local coffee shops to write in. They felt unique. Even the rural area in Kentucky across the bridge from Madison where I worked as a reporter, a sparse area I experienced mostly from driving and sitting in city meetings, is evocative in my memory (I’ve got to write/finish that essay about that time someday). It’s different when I am driving. Then I am noticing the landscape over a soundtrack of contemplative essay collection audiobooks.

I don’t think I got more out of my head as I got older, but I do think having more freedom of movement made me be more aware of my surroundings that they etched themselves better in my brain.

Indiana is also becoming increasingly difficult to write about in terms of queer kids. The landscape is changing for the worse, unfortunately. I am so glad I was able to leave when I did. Trans students must be outed, by law, putting them in potentially dangerous home environments. And if they are supported, they can’t access gender-affirming care. Teachers, especially queer ones, and books are under increased scrutiny. One of my WIPs, the one I had to put aside because of all of this on the horizon starting literally in 2019 or so, features a GSA. My main character is passionate learning about the rights of her community…but I’m going to have to set it at a specific time and take into account the new laws. I guess that’s what I should do: be more specific. But it’s so daunting as the future feels so murky and this is nowhere near publication.

Even though I left teaching and Indiana itself for other reasons, I still feel like a refugee. I’ve lost the Indiana I knew, the Indiana I was a teacher in and thought I would be teaching in for a long time, proving myself. And it all comes with guilt.

So, I suppose my action items to evoke place in my writing are:

• Live in the moment, even the ordinary. Take notes. Mentally narrate. Notice.

• Spend some of my drafting words on setting! Give towns names! Research! Base it off something specific!

• Take note of what writers I admire are doing with setting.

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