FLOATING

The right edge of this polaroid is dated August '71. I don't know who the floating boy is, but when I look at this picture, I see an image of what I often feel like - like I am floating and relaxed, but also like the world is vast and overwhelming, and in the scheme of things, I am just keeping my head above water. 

I found this photo on the ground sometime in 2003. At the time, I was studying landscape architecture at LSU. I was particularly unhappy and confused in the program. I liked pushing myself as a designer (or rather, pulling my own teeth), and I liked learning about the history and relevance of the profession, but none of my efforts came with ease. Being able to visualize solutions clearly is not the same as crafting and problem-solving with visual tools. I had a gap to fill to effectively translate ideas into a visual language. This gap was the source of a lot of struggling.

When I came across this image, I picked it up and taped it to the outside of my sketchbook. It reminded me of my long love affair with water. It was also a source of inspiration, a metaphor of sorts: I was the boy in the water. I needed to relax, not get discouraged and keep floating. Can a single image contain a mantra for life; can the singular experience of floating in water contain a mantra? Occasionally, I pull out the journal this photo is taped too and I meditate on the message the image imbues.

I imagine this picture was taken off the Gulf Coast of Florida. I've visited that coast over and over in my life, as a girl, as an adult. It is a place that soothes me. 

Now, six years after I found the photo, I remain enamored, comforted and conversely, frightened by water bodies. Water imagery works its way into my fiction almost always - as a land[water]scape that supports millions of life forms, some seemingly magical, and also as a place that easily, ironically, dispassionately and with finality, swallows life.

ABOUT THIS BLOG

The immediate settings we occupy and landscapes of the distant past matter in our lives. I believe this. But what is the connective thread between place and memory? I keep coming to the same conclusion; it is a conclusion that eludes me: Narrative.

In a sense, the personal narrative we form as we process our individual experiences of any landscape is our own woven garment. I go to the Grand Canyon, and I carry its memory in a different way than the 68-year-old stranger who stands beside me at the same lookout point. My memory is stitched into layers of previous experiences with place, experiences far removed from the man's experiences.

I am a writer, but being a writer does not make me a good storyteller. I have never been a good storyteller. I'm a better listener than I am a storyteller. Probing others about their own stories, asking question after question until the storyteller stumbles upon new meaning in her own well-worn narrative, that is something I think I'm good at.

Within my fiction, I try to illustrate truths that most people do not easily articulate. This is what makes me a writer. It isn't the ability to tell a good tale; it is my ability and desire to write about place and memory, to share the essential, multiple and sometimes contradictory truths embedded within others’ narratives and my own.

The blanket that covers my shoulders when I descend a ridge of the Grand Canyon contains different colors than the stranger's blanket; it has different textures than the stranger's, another pattern all together. But look closely. You might see that there is one tiny pink thread that runs through my blanket, and it is exactly like one tiny pink thread that runs through the stranger's blanket.

On this blog, I am exploring narrative threads that weave together landscape and memory.

I'm asking people to share a single personal photograph that records a setting and strikes a chord with the owner of the photograph - that evokes a particular memory and emotion, or more intangible, enigmatic memories and emotions. The snapshot might be an image as sublime as a summer thunderstorm, as mundane as a house on a suburban street, or as specific as an interior room - a childhood bedroom, a kitchen, a shampoo station in a beauty parlor. 

I'll post each photograph and share some of my storytellers' words, but I’ll also use my own words to interpret their narratives. If I can, I'll distill decipherable truths within the narratives.

Sometimes, I hope the single pink thread that is in each person's narrative will reveal itself. Other times, I hope the many textures and patterns that clash and compliment each other and each human being will show in blissful and boldest form.