I Am of a Place...

…and from a place, and my work is about that place. Some of us are more deeply rooted than others.

Perhaps, in my last life, I was a tree.

I am from here, I was raised here. Maybe it is some unconscious combination of smell and magnetic alignment makes my body comfortable in this place and no other. I had my astrological chart done once—it was during the ’60s—and there are no earth signs anywhere in my zodiac. It’s all air and fire and water. The woman who was reading my chart said that what I lacked would be what I sought, and once settled somewhere, I would be hard to move. There is truth to what she said, or the power of suggestion worked. Unless I can see these old mountains, some piece of heart is missing in me. I travel, work demands it (travel for me is almost always work), exciting things happen (like some theater doing a play of mine), I meet interesting people who grow to be important to me, but I cannot stay gone from here long without making myself miserable.

This obsession—I could say love, but it is worse than that—is a gift or a curse depending on my mood. I can choose, most of the time, to think of it as a gift. Might as well.

Given such involuntary rootedness, I’d best be willing to work out of a place, or else, there will be no work.

Work. Like most artists, the writing is not exactly a choice either. I’ve quit several times. I can spend the energy some other way for a while but I am always hauled by the hair of the head back into words. Sometimes I despair of ever doing anything worth reading again, but that doesn’t mean there is any choice except to keep trying. It is a labor of Sisyphus—remember the myth? Sisyphus was obliged to roll a huge stone to the top of a mountain and just before he reached the top, it would always escape and roll back down. This was a punishment, it was to go on forever, and he was never to achieve the goal of setting the stone on top the mountain. I think about that story. What a hell. Unless he beat the gods and came to enjoy the labor of it. In other words, what if he found satisfaction in the process and didn’t worry about the goal? What if he even grew to take pleasure in watching the stone roll, free except of gravity, back downhill. I’d like to think he did, but it certainly changes the story. This obligation to try to make words work is the second of the gifts or curses depending on my attitude. If I can take my joy in the process, I can do it and the product makes itself; any other way is a trip to the blues, big time.

Given these constraints, I best be willing to write out of a place. By place, I do not mean that a writer has to specify highway 11E although I’ve done it. And place is more than just landforms but landforms are part of place because landforms shape people as much, if not more, than people shape landforms. By place, I mean the flavor of a society, the beliefs and activities of people who make up a given place. Flannery O’Connor said what the South had that everybody else lacked was a sense of mystery, and literally, manners. I love that. To describe this place, I would keep the sense of mystery and the manners and add a special reverence for story—narrative—and an instinctive play with language.

This place feeds my work, though it took leaving here (for a few years 20+ years ago—I thought then that you had to be from New York if you wanted to be an artist) and coming back to begin to see and hear what was here to begin with.

There are other values, not at all separate from place, but they have more to do with community. And I want to consider the idea of community in relationship to my work.

I have several communities. They serve my work different ways. A whole piece could be devoted to the community of writers I read—I try to keep up with what’s written out of the South. But I’m leaving that one for another time, it is too big to do more than mention. Some communities are more mundane, day to day, and it is those I want to touch. Start with the basic central place functions—grocery store, gas station, auto mechanic, restaurant, movie house (read video rental, these days) and decent bookstore. Most geographers do not consider a bookstore a basic central place function, but I do. It is important to me that I be anonymous at this level of community, and, for the most part, I am in Johnson City. I don’t mean I’m unknown, exactly—the guy at the gas station knows I am a regular customer, but he doesn’t know what I do. It’s my cover, this level of anonymity, I am free to observe and listen. Everything is potentially material, and I harvest what I want of it. Most of my neighbors know my face—we wave to one another—but don’t have any idea what I do. I value this easy slippage because it lets me work without having to explain myself. I am a spy—some would say thief—by nature. I like being invisible.

There is within Johnson City, a community of friends of family that is substantial. Given what I’ve just said, it is an odd community for me to value. I don’t claim consistency. It is, I suspect, part of why some writers have to leave places to work, and sometimes I understand that. It has some aspects of being a bug in a jar. My family lives here and my father’s side has been here since about 1920. People I don’t know, know my family. A woman once stopped me and said “You have to be a Carson, I can tell by your nose.” She went on to say Grandpa taught her math, she remembered the nose from when he wrote on the board. I get stories here, about my grandparents, stories about my father and mother. I get these stories from people who knew them but don’t know me except by a name or a nose, and for no better reason than that they think I should somehow own these stories, they spend the time to tell me. I get stories I don’t remember until they’re told again about my brother and about me. Sometimes I get stories I don’t want to hear. Sometimes, I get things like, “I know you are that Carson girl that writes but what did you ever do for work?” I am usually, but not always, polite. Sometimes, I listen to the same story over and over again, particulary the funny ones about grandpa and grandma, but I don’t mind that, I even like the variations. All this could be, if I let it, a very odd but stringent social code—“these are your boundaries, dear” or “these are our expectations of you,” though I must say my father and his brothers drew some fairly large boundaries. It does not work that way for me. I have a history of bucking other people’s expectations (I was a lousy student, I am an artist in a family of educators, a democrat in a nest of republicans). I hear all this as a very personal history in a place. It is a fourth dimension, time, and it enriches my life here, though I do not write out of the material. I would not hear these stories if I lived somewhere else, I would not meet the people who can tell them. And I probably would not hear as many of them if we all lived somewhere else. Stories like these are commodities of exchange here, and the narration of them is a beloved and practiced artform. I do learn from and use this narrative artform.

There is also a community of my friends. This community can almost speak for itself—people to do things with. I spend time with friends, eat dinner with friends, work horses with friends. Most of these people know what I do and but some don’t. The horse group has no idea—most of them are not great readers—and I don’t tell them. They are fixing to become material.

And family: they’re racontotours, all of them. What I know about stories and telling them begins around my parent’s dinner table. Since I was a child, I wanted to be able to make the whole bunch of them listen to me with as much pleasure as I listened to them. It was narrative, comic narrative, and what was funny was as much the play with language—usually an ironic understatement, like calling a bad case of poison ivy an extended entertainment—as the story itself. I remember hiccups time and again from laughing so much. I remember everyone with tears in their eyes from laughing. Now, two beers and I have hiccups, and family dinners have changed. The centers are gone from them. Sometimes, when I speak or read from my work for audiences (the closest I come to performance) and they laugh, I think maybe I’m in the same ballpark. This stuff is not material, it was always spoken, not written ( it doesn’t work written), but I do carry the patterns (rhythms) of their speech. Uncle Tom taught me comic delivery.

One more family note: I can survive the economics of being a self-employed artist with less suffering than most because my father gave me the house I live in. He had had it as rental property. I was already living in it when he and I began the eight years we spent caregiving my mother. He was the primary caregiver; I was his back up, but even back up was a day in, day out, need. My mother is a victim of Alzheimers. (This was material, the play “Daytrips.”) When he gave me the deed, he said “you probably would have bought something on your own by now if you hadn’t helped.” Maybe. I had cut back on gigs, put work on hold, because the need was so pressing. But probably not. At that time, I would have had to quit writing and take a 9-5 job with a dependable paycheck to have bought a house, any house, even the one he gave me. The writing wasn’t paying worth a damn. The little house was a dump with mice in the cabinets and cats in the ceiling; the little house was and is an extrodinary gift. When he gave it to me, it meant I could try to make my writing work and sell. It was Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own.” Now, it means I can work at what I want, whenever I want, live well, and do anything with the house except make it big. It will never be big. He also said, when he gave me the deed, that owning property would finally make a republican out of me. It didn’t. The house is a part of my rootedness—why go somewhere I would have to pay rent?—but it is much more. It is the freedom to fail should I need it—I’m not suggesting failure is ever easy or desirable—but the house is the net that hangs under the high wire. I won’t die if I fall off.

There is one more community that is important to my work. It is a community of people who care about ideas. These are real people but they are also the people I imagine reading what I write as I sit in front of the computer working at it. They are supportive but they are not easy. This community depends a lot on the US mail, or the telephone, though a few of the people live here. It is made up of other writers and teachers, theater people and other artists. This one is the hardest to come by, this one costs the most. I make family beyond my biological family out of people in this group. Sometimes you find a sister whether you had it in mind or not. Some, I am able to do for them what they do for me. Several are smarter than I am. A few are professional relationships that grew. A very few are not even good friends, but they are good critics. This is an odd community; it is my own and nobody else’s. Many of these people don’t know each other, though some do. If I were a business woman, these might be professional contacts that help me make my living. But writing is not business, even though I do try to sell what I write. Any of the arts is more like mining the heart (or mind) and the product, even if it is not autobiographical, is still out of, and of, the artist. This community is much more personal than you might imagine, more rigorous than you might expect. A community of peers. My compatriots and competitors, heat and light. My bones.

This does not yet speak of being from Appalachia and the opportunity can’t pass unmentioned.

I was in my late 20s and back from living in New York before I had any awareness of being from “Appalachia.” As a child, I had kin who didn’t have indoor plumbing and still plowed behind horses, but going there was a real treat: they let me ride those big old horses. What I knew from college was that I shouldn’t sound like I’m from here. New York had been part of my awakening, in part because I did still sound like I was from here and people were either rude about it or enchanted by it. Appalachia had become fashionable—remember the war on poverty?—but I still had no sense of being from Appalachia. Appalachia was the coal mines. There was even a town named Appalachia in southwest Virginia. Appalachia was there. So what is proximity on the map or a range of mountains? And there are those folks who hold, even now, that my Appalachian credentials are questionable. I was even described once—in print by a coal country Appalachian—as a writer who came from California and learned to sound like I was from here, and copied down things people said. I think I was supposed to be honored. My friend, George Ella Lyon, another writer, says you can be from Harlan (town) in Harlan County, Kentucky, (she is) and if your daddy owned a dry cleaners instead of working in a coal mine, your credentials are questionable. The truth is, I am amused. It has served me very well to be from a place, living in that place, sounding like I am from that place, and writing out of it. I am an exotic. I used to think it was because I was from Appalachia. I have a different understanding now. I am of, and from, a single place, and most people don’t have the privilege. Economic realities demand mobility; people hold positions, not places, and really loving a place can break your heart. I am a throw back, an economic, if not evolutionary, anomaly, and if I had done something besides writing (teaching, acting, almost any “regular professional” job) my story would probably be very different. I was fortunate, Appalachia became marketable about the same time I was trying to market myself as a performer of my own work. I have been able to stay because I could get gigs other places. It is still, in part, true, though I have a better cushion now with book publications and plays. And the house.

Jo Carson is a writer/performer from Upper East Tennessee. She has published plays, short stories, work for children, essays and poems. Her play “Daytrips,” about a family’s battle with Alzheimer’s Disease, won the Kesselring Award for 1989. Recent work has included creating performance pieces out of oral histories and current stories to be performed by and for the communities the stories come from. This story was first published in High Performance #64, Winter 1993.

Original CAN/API publication: October 2003