Greetings, readers.
Every writer needs to practice an elevator pitch - not because agents ride in elevators, but because we are notoriously reluctant to speak about our work. We agonize over every word, thus we hate to dilute our precision by mumbling about how we write Great American Novels. For nonfiction writers like myself, whose art is a constant experiment of exposition, the task can be even more daunting. We write about what is real. We tell stories, but through the decisions we make about how we reveal the story, we invent it. This is the fusion of form and content.
Somewhere, some years between the land of the Sleeping Giant and the Carpathian Basin, I acquired the theme "concepts of home." Ernest Hebert, author of the great American novel The Old American, was my first professor of creative writing. He wore a red plaid jacket and carved spoons out of wood in a studio behind his New Hampshire home. In the summer of 2002, I was writing short stories about my maternal great-grandmothers. I had fictionalized Cresenz Schermer, who came to New York from Germany in the 1890s, so that she had morphed into an Italian farmgirl, much like Teresa Marmo was. Building on primary research I had earnestly (and unsuccessfully) begun by calling the Museum of the City of New York for archival assistance with my eighth grade research project, I was attempting to understand why both women left home.
"Where are you from?" Ernie asked me one summer afternoon in his Sanborn office. "Outside of New Haven," I said. We were three hours north of it on Interstate 91. "Is there anything going on there?" he asked. Or maybe he stated, "There must be something interesting there." I could not imagine there was anything worth investigating, worth sharing, worth writing about in my hometown of Hamden, Connecticut. We were a little fish in a big pond, an ordinary suburb in the vast continent of America. I was after Big Things - social change, the essence of existence.
My resistance to look closer to home for inspiration ended the next summer, when I had emergency brain surgery in the hospital where I was born. Suddenly, home became not only the place that most interested me, but home was quite literal, quite small. It was a space between my ears, it was a physical realm I inhabited, not only the view out the window, but the window itself - and the window had almost cracked.
Years later, in New York City, someone in a nonfiction workshop asked me why I had named an essay about the fallout from the largest proposed environmental remediation in the state of Connecticut "Where I Was From." Two doors down in Richard Locke's Thursday afternoon lecture, we had just read Didion. I devoured her words like Maine bears take to fresh blueberries.
Now, I live in Budapest. From my home I can walk to the Danube. On my way I can stop near the park to order pastries that remind me of the cafe where my University Writing Program colleagues and my writer friends would congregate, on Amsterdam & 11th, one block from where I had lived for a few seasons on West 112th. I keep a copy of my essay collection "Land of the Sleeping Giant: Imagining Home" on my desk in the university where young scholars from over one hundred and ten countries come, for a year or two or more, to learn how to articulate and disseminate their policy visions and research claims. Many will return home with ideas to implement. Others will carry on elsewhere.
My students are in public policy, gender studies, international business law & environmental sciences. They are from Ethiopia, Hungary, China, Ghana, Mexico, Serbia - the list goes on, with no ordering principle. But we are all bound together in that each of us writes from a place, a place that gives us voice and sight and against which we measure all else.
And that is home.
Welcome to my narrative. I'll need a very slow elevator to tell this one.
