Writing in Place
I have written for many years in a series of half abandoned notebooks, across various phone apps, and in scattered word and google docs.
My writing is everywhere and yet it is nowhere.
Lately, I've found myself wanting to be less of an island. I have never really known writers. I have never been in a community of creatives and I am starting to wonder what I might be missing out on. I also enjoy reading what others write. I delight in seeing the glimpses of other worlds and other lives which dance on the page as someone, who I will likely never meet or know, chooses to make meaning with words.
I feel I share a kinship with these people because this is my favoured method too. I write to extract demons and celebrate moments, to cement lessons and express feelings that I don't know how to give life to while meeting the eyes of another over a cup of coffee. I write because I always have. Because I’m driven by the urge to do so. I write for the sense of resolution I feel when I look back over my words and realise that a messy jumble of feelings and thoughts have somehow found a way out.
Once while working on a research project I realised that I was using the words space and place interchangeably. A quick search for the difference between the two brought me down a philosophical rabbit hole where I spent months reading about what qualities turn a space into a place.
Basically, anywhere can be a space. Spaces are a spot on the map, a piece of land, buildings and sites upon which something can exist.
But place is a little more tricky. A space becomes a place when it is infused with meaning. Place is what makes a house become a home or makes a set of coordinates relate to a sense of nostalgia. Places engage our emotions. We can literally feel a sense of place.
Places often have a social component. We can exist in a space, but words like belonging, community, friendship and identity are the words of place. We create places through our presence. Our stories become embodied in places and places become an essential part of the stories we tell about ourselves.
My writing exists in many spaces but it does not exist in place. I hope to change that.
P.S. Please feel free to say hi