There is more than one way of writing home.
In the proverbial sense, we pen letters and emails (and perhaps Facebook posts) to audiences we associate with that word, “home”, keeping connections strong through strands of thought, persuasion, intimacy. At other times, we “write home” by writing of home, describing the geographic locations, the specific latitudes and longitudes, flora and fauna, that we love.
For some writers, such as Henry David Thoreau, “writing home” conveyed both meanings. Many Americans know that Thoreau wrote of home in the second sense, as his famous book Walden attests. There are few other works so dedicated to anchoring words in place. For Thoreau, home was beyond description, yet he spent a lifetime trying to convey its changefulness, beauty, and worth.
But Thoreau also “wrote home” in the former sense: he was constantly writing for the people he loved in Concord, Massachusetts. This was one of the things, in fact, that Ralph Waldo Emerson faulted Thoreau for in an obituary penned after his friend’s premature passing: while others would wander far and wide, exercising leadership in a more grand and sweeping sense (Emerson included), Thoreau seemed quite happy—too happy, in Emerson’s opinion—to focus his attention on the place he loved.
While many associate Walden more with withdrawal from society than with a love of community, the book was in fact dedicated to a specific audience: to Concord, and more specifically, to the Concord Lyceum. Thoreau was an active participant in the Lyceum throughout his lifetime, biographer Laura Dassow Walls writes. In addition to writing and delivering speeches to his local Lyceum audience, Thoreau also worked as a Lyceum curator, arranging lectures and communicating with potential speakers. In fact, Walls believes that most of Thoreau’s writings were forged for and through Lyceum speeches. Perceptions of Thoreau as antisocial are misinformed, she suggests. He was, indeed, painfully shy and awkward. He struggled to make new friends. But he loved Concord and was constantly thinking about its human and nonhuman members—writing for them, to them, and alongside them. His huckleberry picking parties, his time in Concord’s jail (refusing to pay taxes in order to protest slavery and the Mexican American War), and his speeches and books all orbited this local world, part of his efforts to persuade and inform the people he loved.
Why care about Thoreau’s home-focused writing in our own context and time?
I would suggest that Thoreau’s example matters to us because we’ve stopped believing that “writing home” matters in both the above senses.
We’ve bought Emerson’s condemnation of Thoreau hook, line, and sinker. We’ve stopped believing that writing or thinking in the context of a home audience matters. The bigger the audience the better. Local and midsize regional newspapers are struggling to stay afloat. Local politics are unglamorous and often unconsidered—especially when contrasted to the United States’ flashy, controversial presidential politics. In our personal lives, the importance of a post on social media is generally measured in its virality or “influencer” status.
Secondly, because we’ve invested our sense of worth in a national or global audience rather than a local one, we don’t pay enough attention to home in all its diversity, mystery, and importance. We easily take home for granted. It slips past us unnoticed, unless or until troubles and perils force us to pay attention. We can easily forget that our homes are changing, growing—even, perhaps, suffering—around us. The work of “writing home,” then, remains the important and undervalued work of thinking deeply and carefully about the particular places in which we live. Some of the most important environmental stewards and social activists of the 20th and 21st century—individuals like Wendell Berry, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Dorothy Day—have focused their writing and activism not just on large national and global battles, but on the health and wellbeing of their local communities, local politics, and local ecology.
In Walden, Laura Dassow Walls suggests, Thoreau wanted to convince local readers to consider home as a splendorous ecosystem: a web of human and nonhuman life, including pond and forest alongside street and house. He urged Concord citizens to expand their vision of home even as he focused it within a limited radius. He thus wrote “home” in order to challenge popular understandings of the term, in an act that was critical even as it was immensely loving. This is the big challenge of writing about place, and it suggests that there is far more work to do in building conversations in and around the subject of home. As Wendell Berry has written, “to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.” I would suggest that we can all build this local knowledge, and therefore also build our love for our homes.
I wrote this piece for The Lyceum Movement, and they were kind enough to give me permission to share it with you all this month. Check out the original post, and the excellent work of The Lyceum Movement, here!
How do you think about “writing home”? Does it matter to you? What writers, activists, community members, or family members have you looked to for inspiration in this regard?
articles
Public libraries throughout the U.S. are giving away seeds, Bridge Shirvell writes: “By offering patrons free seeds, the libraries can also combat hunger insecurity and biodiversity loss—all while building community resilience.”
Sarah Pulliam Bailey profiles a Christian ecologist in The Washington Post: “People will care for the things that they love,” [Lindroth] said. “They love the things they’re intimately connected to.”
Greta Moran writes of the promise “open source tractors” might offer to the “right to repair” movement.
The turn to local food during the pandemic may not last, John-Paul Heil writes for The Week: “A post-pandemic decline in small farms is coming and its most exacting costs will be human.”
essays
A beautiful post from Phil Christmas about “Smalltown, U.S.A.” (with some very kind words about Uprooted): “It’s surely untrue that we can save every place—climate change alone makes this impossible. But we will think better about these decisions if we take it as axiomatic that any place where people now live is worth saving. Not because of the role it plays in some national mythology, not because of the values it embodies …. It is worth saving because people live there.”
Jeff Reimer writes of “spheres” and “scenes,” and how the two shape our experience: “As I’ve observed, scenes operate in a co-productive, interlaced symbiosis with traditional authority structures and institutional presence, not in antagonism toward them. Scenes require stability lest they become purely chaotic.”
Steven Carter writes about leaving home vs. staying in place for the Front Porch Republic: “People like me are supposed to ‘prove themselves’ in the city and only return to the small communities they came from to flaunt their accolades or to retire. Why must it be that way?”
Alan Jacobs suggests that social media trains us to see our brains as servers, “as machines designed to receive requests and respond to them according to strict instructions,” and points to Mikhail Bakhtin and Charles Dickens in response: “In his magnificent essay “Epic and Novel” (1941), Bakhtin writes of the ‘surplus of humanness’ that each of us possesses and that makes us—this is a numinous term for him—‘unfinalizable.’ No one can say the last and complete word about any of us.”
books
Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko
A stunning novel, full of depth and beauty. Silko writes of Tayo’s return to the Laguna reservation where he grew up following World War II, the hauntedness he experiences in the aftermath of the war’s violence and loss, and his “intensely personal quest for sanity in a broken world.” The book, as it unfolds, condemns centuries of atrocities and exploitation experienced by indigenous peoples, even as it continues to focus, with sharp and poignant precision, on Tayo’s experiences.Untrustworthy, by Bonnie Kristian
I’m really excited for you all to read Bonnie’s new book. (I got to read an advance copy, and wrote a blurb for the back.) With her characteristic wisdom, thoughtfulness, and acuity, Bonnie helps us to consider the epistemological crisis of our time and fracturing of news institutions and media, and considers ways to reform and renew our patterns of news consumption.
food
We made strawberry shortcakes in April, in honor of my grandmother’s birthday (she passed away in 2014). This was her favorite dessert. Making them on her birthday is a tradition I started a couple years ago, one I hope to continue as our little ones get older.
Loved this recipe for chicken and potatoes with Dijon Cream Sauce. (Served with roasted asparagus and a salad.) We ate the leftovers for lunch with quinoa and fresh arugula.
Recipes-that-aren’t-recipes: we made popcorn with finely chopped basil, parmesan, salt, pepper, and butter. 10/10. Our favorite homemade pizza this month: we used pesto, sautéed leeks, and onions as a base, then covering the pizza with fresh arugula and a balsamic drizzle once it cooled slightly.
community notes
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the Living the Good Life discussion with Jessica Hooten Wilson! So many wonderful and thoughtful questions were asked. You can find the recording on YouTube here.
In case you’ve missed past events and book club activities —Two years ago, we studied Marilynne Robinson’s Jack together (click here to watch our YouTube discussion of the book): week one, week two, week three, and week four.
We talked to Jeffrey Bilbro about his book Reading the Times last May—alas, I forgot to record that talk, which means we need to have a Zoom webinar with Jeff again soon! Read Jeff’s consideration of reading news and creativity for Granola.
In June 2021, Leah Libresco Sargeant and I talked to Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell about their book The Innovation Delusion, and I wrote a post about maintenance and memento mori for Granola.
Last fall, I shared discussion / study questions for Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter: chapters 1-4, 5-7, 8-10, 11-15, 16-19, and 20-24.
Here are the discussions / study questions for Pete Davis’s Dedicated (and my Q&A with Davis): “The Day of Small Things,” “How To Become a ‘Long-Haul Hero’,” “Make Tiny, Loving Interventions,” “To Love Is To Attend,” “A Vision of the Good Life,” and “Reforest Your Community.”
This year, we’ve also talked to Joy Clarkson about her book Aggressively Happy, and to Charles Camosy about his book Losing Our Dignity.
When will the next book club be?