pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Books and a Beat.

You might have noticed my interest in writing with a strong sense of place, or place-based writing. You might have also noticed that my family moved ~2,500 miles about 18 months ago. And so books like this one always catch my eye. Melody Warnick is a quirky, likeable narrator who makes a quite serious quantity of research easily manageable in her study of the “art and science” of place attachment.

Here’s a meta-meta teaser to blow your mind today.

“Edmund Wilson once wrote that no two people ever read the same book, and I’ve come to believe that no two people ever live in the same city,” notes the writer Emily St. John Mandel. Our experience of the place where we live depends entirely on who we are, how we interact with it, and how we interpret what’s happening around us. We create our places every day by the way we choose to view them.

You will recall how I’ve enjoyed Emily St. John Mandel (here, here). This is Warnick quoting Mandel quoting (the critic) Wilson: whoa. And what a perfect sentiment. I’m all about this theory of infinite relativity, myself: that all our experiences are always relative, individual, and subjective. So no one who loves a place is ever “wrong”, and a person who hates a place is only “wrong” in that they’ve failed to leave room for someone else’s love.

Lots more place-relative wisdom on offer in This Is Where You Belong. Stay tuned.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

Filed under: tuesday teasers | Tagged: nonfiction, sense of place |