LITERARY NARRATIVE: Passage A is adapted from an essay by Marita Golden. Passage B is adapted from an essay by Larry L. King. Both essays are from the book Three Minutes or Less: Life Lessons from America's Greatest Writers (©2000 by The PEN/Faulkner Foundation).
Passage A by Marita Golden
Writers are always headed or looking for home. Home is the first sentence, questing into the craggy terrain of imagination. Home is the final sentence, polished, perfected, nailed down. I am American writer, and so my sense of place is constantly shifting1. The spaciousness of this land reigns and pushes against the borders of self-censorship and hesitation. I have claimed at one point or other everyplace as my home.
Like their creator, my fictional characters reject the notion of life lived on automatic pilot. The most important people in my books see life as a flame, something that when lived properly bristles and squirms, even as it glows. In the autobiography Migrations of the Heart, the heroine, who just happened to be me, came of age in Washington, D.C., and began the process of becoming an adult person everywhere else. If you sell your first piece of writing in Manhattan, give birth to your only child in Lagos, experience Paris in the spring with someone you love, and return to Washington after thirteen years of self-imposed exile to write the Washington novel that nobody else had and you thought you never would2, passport, visas, lingua franca will all become irrelevant. When all places fingerprint the soul, which grasp is judged to be the strongest? In my novel A Woman's Place, one woman leaves America to join a liberation struggle in Africa. In Long Distance Life, Naomi Johnson flees 1930s North Carolina and comes up to Washington, D.C. to find and make her way. Thirty years later her daughter returns to that complex, unpredictable geography that is sculpted like some unexpected work of art by the civil-rights movement.
I am a Washington writer, who keeps one bag in the closet packed, just in case. I am an American who knows the true color of the nation's culture and its heart, a stubborn, wrenching, rainbow3. I am Africa's yearning stepchild, unforgotten, misunderstood, necessary. Writers are always headed or looking for home. The best of us embrace and rename it when we get there.
Passage B by Larry L. King
If you live long enough, and I have, your sense of place or your place becomes illusionary. In a changing world, our special places are not exempt. The rural Texas where I grew up in the 1930s and 1940s simply does not exist anymore. It exists only in memory or on pages or stages where a few of us have attempted to lock it in against the ravages of time. And it is, of course, a losing battle. Attempting to rhyme my work of an earlier Texas with the realities of today's urban-tangled Texas, I sometimes feel that I am writing about pharaohs4.
My friend Larry McMurtry a few years ago stirred up a Texas tornado with an essay in which he charged that Texas writers stubbornly insist on writing of old Texas, the Texas of myth and legend, while shirking our responsibilities to write of the complexities of modern Texas. Hardly had the anguished cries of the wounded faded away on the Texas wind, until Mr. McMurtry himself delivered a novel called Lonesome Dove. A cracking good yarn, if a bit long on cowboy myths and frontier legends, and decidedly short of skyscraper observations or solutions to urban riddles. But not only did Larry McMurtry have a perfect right to change his mind, I'm delighted that he did.
I spent my formative years in Texas, my first seventeen years, before random relocation arranged by the U.S. Army5. Uncle Sam sent me to Queens. I must admit, Queens failed to grow on me. But from it I discovered Manhattan, which did grow on me, and I vowed to return to Manhattan. And one day did. But before that, in 1954, at the age of twenty-five, I came to Washington, D.C., to work in Congress.
New York and Washington offered themselves as measuring sticks against the only world I had previously known. They permitted me to look at my natural habitat with fresh eyes and even spurred me to leave my native place. I have now tarried here in what I call the misty East for almost forty years. This has sometimes led to a confusion of place. I strangely feel like a Texan in New York and Washington, but when I return home to Texas, I feel like a New Yorker or a Washingtonian. So if my native place has been guilty of change, then so have I. Yet when I set out to write there is little of ambivalence6. The story speaks patterns, and values that pop out are from an earlier time and of my original place. I fancy myself a guide to the recent past7. In an age when the past seems not much value, I think that is not a bad function for the writer.