Writing Place

Between 2012 and 2014, I served as Artist in Residence in five U.S. National Parks. I devoted a total of seven months to living and working in forests and wetlands and deserts in all four corners of the continental United States. Since then, I have continued to seek outdoor spaces to work in, to write about, and to contemplate. Regardless of genre, literature must be anchored in a world, whether that’s the lived world or one created in the author’s mind. My experiences in places that we label “wild” and “remote,” as well as “urban” and “dangerous” have inspired me to think deeply about the concept of “sense of place.” What does that term mean? Where did it come from? Why does it matter?

As I seek answers to these questions, I have offered workshops and given lectures on this (wide) topic, at all give national parks where I served as writer in residence, as well as at art museums, historical museums, literary centers, libraries, and MFA programs. I have taught classes on this topic several times at Pacific Lutheran University. It’s perhaps my favorite topic to discuss with writers.

“A place is a story happening many times,” as the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw (Kwakiutl) people have said. When I first encountered this statement, quoted in a book of essays by Kim Stafford, I was stopped short. Yes, I thought, precisely. We are a story-making species: mere location becomes place when we construct a narrative around it. This crucial insight, expressed so succinctly by the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, is one of my operating principles as a writer and translator — even as a human being.

The concept that writers refer to as “sense of place” goes by different names in other disciplines: “place attachment” in anthropology, “topophilia” in geography, “community sentiment” in landscape history, “insidedness” in psychology, and “rootedness” in sociology. (Thanks to sociologist Jennifer Cross for these terms.) It is no coincidence that so many disciplines have identified and named this concept; neuroscience research indicates that developing a sense of place is intrinsic to human neuro-physiology. Scientists have long known that human beings can subconsciously perceive magnetic fields, contributing to our sense of direction. More recently, neuroscientists have identified “sense of place cells” in the human brain: “place” cells in the hippocampus and “grid” cells nearby. Together, these cells allow us to sense where we are and to attach that perception to our long-term memory. We are not only a storytelling species, but a map-making species.  We are hard-wired to develop a sense of place. Below are examples of my writing in which sense of place plays a key role.

These essays, written and published over two decades, are rooted in urban and rural places where I have lived and worked: Seattle’s coastal lands, Southern California’s deserts, New England’s forests, Florida’s Everglades, the mountains and coasts of Oaxaca, Mexico and Petén, Guatemala. 

In 2024 and 2025, I am completing a book (tentatively) titled Sense of Place on the Page, under contract with the University of Chicago Press, for their “Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing” series.

“A Pandemic with Precedent,” Madrona Project, Vol 2, Empty Bowl Press, Anacortes, WA, Summer 2021

“Quiet: The Sound of Freedom,” Terrain “Letter to America” series, Tucson, June 30, 2020

“Five Scapes,” Seattle Review of Books, Seattle, WA, January 2016 

“Endangered Language: A poet preserves indigenous language through performance,” Orion, November / December 2014

“Life in 98118: Seattle’s Rainier Valley—One of America’s Most Diverse Zipcodes,” One Nation Indivisible, November 2012

“Don’t Step Here,” Guernica, November 1, 2012

“Looking South: The Mexican Isthmus Through Gringo Glasses,” Common-Place, July 2011

“Learning to Distinguish Bicycles from Refrigerators: A Letter from Tehuantepec,” Blue Mesa Review, Issue 15, Spring 2003, republished in Taller: Centrum Literary Online, Port Townsend, WA, January 2011 

“Seeing the Forest, Not Just the Trees: A Guatemalan Village and Conservation,” Terrain: A Journal of Built & Natural Environments, Winter/Spring 2004

“Living Elsewhere in 16 Steps” co-authored with Sasha Welland, Chain, Issue 9: Dialogue (pages 59-69 at this link), Summer 2002