I am thirty-two years old and this is the first time I have lived east of the Mississippi river (save for that disastrous six-month stint in the interior swamp of Florida when I was eleven years old-but that’s another story).

I am a Western girl-born and bred. And yet my relationship with my geography has always been complicated. Growing up in Arizona and Colorado, I was half-raised by my Yankee grandmothers who told me stories about ‘Back East’ and the family pedigree, whose roots trail back to the ships following the Mayflower. I listened and absorbed and when I visited Rhode Island or Connecticut, I was sort of awed by towns founded in the 1600’s, particularly since I was a product of Western Suburban Sprawl–those tract homes of the 1970’s and 1980’s that ate up prairie and desert and foothills. One of my favorite activities as a child was going to look at model homes with my grandmother. But I also grew up camping and skiing. I spent most of my twenties rock climbing and hiking up mountains and being always a breath away from wild land.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I was not raised on a mountaintop with a pack of wolves as pets and the ability to make fires with just a shard of glass and some half-wet kindling. (Leave that to my Alaskan friends!) And yet….the landscape, the short but vivid history of the West, the scale and grandeur and harshness and even the quick and neat carving of wilderness into the suburban—all of it was so much a part of me that I couldn’t see it.

When I moved out to Pittsburgh for graduate school, I was more than happy to be leaving Boulder, heading east, closer to where things were created, where they were happening.  I didn’t think I would miss Colorado in the least. But now, six months in,

I am yearning for it terribly, feeling a sensory longing for sunshiny huge skies and the smell of sagebrush (my god, that sounds cliché, but it’s actually true) and the tilted mountains right behind my house where, five minutes into hiking, I am completely alone. Part of this is the backlash to moving anywhere new to pursue a different life, but another part is plain culture shock, a hemmed in feeling that is as much psychological as geographical. But more importantly, I have– surprisingly–come to understand that I have been marked by the West in ways that I could not even imagine, most particularly in my writing life.

Now, much has been written about the myth of the West in the American psyche and its cultural and literary shadow (Marilynne Robinson writes about it smartly), but living out West, I never paid much attention to it. I knew that there was, particularly in writing and publishing circles, a sense that America is pretty much two coasts with a great expanse of nothing in between. I vaguely understood that there was western writing, but that’s not what I wrote—and I didn’t read much of it or engage with it critically as Western. Edward Abbey was always a favorite, but more for his politics than for a particular regional flavor in his writing.

And so when I arrived in Pittsburgh, I didn’t see myself or my writing as regional. Now I am reevaluating. Because I am being exposed to so much other fiction and criticism in workshops and classes, I am naturally thinking about my writing in relation to what I am reading, and am coming to discover that my stuff is different. And perhaps that’s not because of individualistic style or nuance, but because there are values, ideas, aesthetic preferences, and emotional connections that are unique to where I grew up. “Everyone who lives in the West,” Laura Pritchett writes, “is influenced by terrain, weather and nature.”  How can we not be? The land is big and beautiful and nature is harsh and unforgiving. Weather is dramatic—sunny and warm one day in January, a blizzard the next. So many people I know in Colorado engage with the land in ways that have serious consequences. They are willing to risk their lives to reach the top of the mountain, to engage with nature in extreme ways that are really conversations about freedom and wildness and what it is to be alive.

My writing is marked by this. The landscape is always an important part of whatever I write, a character that cradles my other, human, characters in the palm of her hand. Space is also integral. I often, reading back, find much silence and ‘empty’ physical and emotional space in my work. Some people tell me my stories start very slowly, the beginnings stretched out and contemplative, the ‘real’ writing not happening until a few pages into the narrative. And (I’ve heard this as a characteristic of other western writers) my characters tend to look outward instead of inward. They find meaning and closure through their engagement with each other and the world around them, they are always moving and contemplating, never just sitting and thinking. Their answers tend to be in the world, not necessarily just in themselves (even though what I write tends to be contemplative and quiet).

This last tendency is one that other writers and readers who grew up in the West tend to understand easily, while eastern readers and writers are always calling for my characters to ‘think’ and ‘express’ more. John R. Milton, editor of the South Dakota Review, believes that “eastern writing tends to be compatible with Freudian thought, whereas western writing “seems to lie within the sphere of Jungian influence”. James Work describes the difference well. He says that while eastern fiction “tends to begin with a character (“Call me Ishmael”) and then turns inward to explore his/her psychological tensions, inner turmoils and mental tempests” western writers “begin with a character in conflict and then move outward into the environment. The environment starts acting like a character while the protagonist moves toward it and interacts with it… You can see the difference in Cormac McCarthy. Noticing that the main character in All the Pretty Horses has lost his father, is disillusioned by his circumstances and has only one friend who is another coming-of-age male, you are tempted to have ol’ Cormac lie down on the Freudian fainting couch and examine his feelings about his parents. However, the personal inner stresses of these two Texas boys fade out. Their lives open into the landscape of the Mexican border country. They become mythic, archetypal figures. They act out the pattern of “separation, initiation, return” that Joseph Campbell described. The focus begins with them and reaches out into the environment”.

Learning the characteristics of my writing style and the influences that have shaped it has been an important part of discovering the particularities of my talent and capabilities as a writer. I believe that there are strengths to writing from an interior place in which nature and the physical world hold just as much interest and importance as the individual interior monologue. In which the word ‘loneliness’ has ‘strong positive connotations’ in Marilynne Robinson’s words. In which people exist in worlds that are bigger than themselves and each other. Knowing that this is an important part of my voice, I can protect it and help it to thrive in ways that allow readers to understand and share with me its beauty.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 at 9:33 pm and is filed under j.a. howard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.