In September of last year, I wrote about the two places that have most inspired me as a writer—two rooms in two different homes. In November of last year I wrote about the stage set for playwright August Wilson’s autobiographical play and how the various props illuminated his life and his writing. I imagined how I might design such a stage set for myself.
Then, on a Mediterranean Cruise I was lucky enough to take last month, I discovered a book in the ship’s library titled Paradise of Exiles by Olive Hamilton published in 1974. In it she tells the stories of several British writers drawn to Tuscany for important portions of their creative lives—Shelley, Byron, the Brownings, Trollope, D.H. Lawrence, the Sitwells and others. What drew them there? The climate, the cost of living, the company of other writers? And how did the spirit of this place affect their work?
Our ship stopped at a port in Tuscany. I could see how it might attract artists of all kinds. We also stopped at ports along the Côte d’Azur in France where many painters have come because of the quality of the light (or so I have read). I can attest that it is stunning. All this left me wondering how my own creative journey has been affected by my place is the physical world—primarily the capital city of the United States, Washington D.C. What if I had moved mid-career to the Big Bend area of Southwest Texas, something I seriously contemplated at one time? Would I have written about the borderlands instead of the city? What subjects would I have addressed? What shapes would my writing have taken? Perhaps there’s a clue in this never-finished poem from back then:
We sit in the desert
high on a limestone ledge
watching the dying sun
draw blood from the mountains.
Below us the river,
a blade of whetted steel,
knifes its way through rock
We are not surprised
at news of desert storms
for we have come to expect violence
in a land where the wind
cows every unbowed head
and even the plants, to survive,
poison the ground around them.