Where The Heart Is

Exercise Your InkTank

“The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of ‘What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?’ – and that is the heart's field.”
- Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” Collected Essays, New York, 1994.

It seems like all we writers ever talk about is character. Character, character, character. As though there’s nothing more to stories than the people who occupy them. But characters have to have places to be, right? In fact, in order to be, they must be somewhere, unless (of course) they’re disembodied voices. Even if we don’t invest a great deal of attention to place as storytellers, there always is place in our stories. It’s inevitable. And it’s more important than folks might think. As Eudora Welty phrases it, “fiction depends for its life on place.” Without place, there is no story, and without the story, there is no storyteller. Our lives too depend on place.

When conversations about place happen, they’re often about regional classifications. Writers who write with a strong sense of place in their stories are often categorized by that place. Their work is often said to be in some sense about place, or the place is said to be a character in the story in the sense that it plays a significant role. Many people read regional writing in order to get a sense of that place – this places a good deal of responsibility on the writers. They have the power to determine the character of their homes in the minds of all their readers.

You’ve heard of that wily band of Southern writers and you know how those East Coast writers can be. Sometimes you hear about Midwestern writers and sometimes the talk telescopes in on a particular Midwestern city like Chicago. In the work of Stuart Dybek, for example, we find Chicago rendered in intricate detail. But have you ever heard anything about those Cincinnati, Ohio writers? Who are they? What are they doing? Let’s find out.

Who is Cincinnati?
Rather than beginning with an idea of character, we’re going to begin today with an idea of place. We all live in or around the same place and yet I’d wager that none of us see it in quite the same way. Just as our ways of seeing and experiencing are informed by our distinct senses of place, so will our characters be informed by the world surrounding them. Our rendering of our place and the people who occupy it will determine Cincinnati’s character in the minds of our readers. Think about it. You have the power to make Cincinnati who it is. You might begin by considering the ways in which Cincinnati has made you who you are. Begin with a specific location. Describe it. What details make that place who it is? Write a paragraph in which your sense of who Cincinnati is, is evoked.