Open House: Writers Rediefine Home - Graywolf Forum Five
304
Open House: Writers Rediefine Home - Graywolf Forum Five
304Paperback
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Overview
"Where do I live? I don't have a ready answer, not really, but I've realized there's something I like about not having an answer. And indeed something of that spirit—a curious, open engagement with the now, in its slippery and uncertain character—animates this book." —Mark Doty, from his Introduction
In a shifting world, concepts of place and home take many forms. In Open House, Mark Doty gathers an impressive group of writers to describe their contemporary sense of home. Victoria Redel lives her teenage years from inside a fifteen-pound body cast—loving and hating the loss of her body; Barbara Hurd finds that within a cave, the absence of all light allows for clarity of vision; and Andrea Barrett wipes filth from a sill in her Brooklyn apartment only to realize that the dirt is actually "ash of buildings, ash of planes. Ash of people." Surroundings—walls, trees, or states of mind—are defined by our reactions to them. These essays are about how the mind can create a home—for a moment, or for a lifetime.
Contributors include Bernard Cooper, Carol Muske-Dukes, Deborah Lott, Elizabeth McCracken, Mary Morris, and Terry Tempest Williams.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555973827 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2003 |
| Series: | Graywolf Annual Series , #5 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.94(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.75(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Open House
Writers on HomeBy Mark Doty
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2003 Mark DotyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 1-55597-382-5
Chapter One
From the Introduction by Mark Doty:So where do I live? I don't have a ready answer, but I've realized there's something I like about not having an answer. Something of that spirit - a curious, open engagement with the now, in its slippery and uncertain character - animates this book. Some version of my question lies behind each of these essays; they are complex responses to a strange place and time in which to find oneself. Sometimes home is found in unexpected places: Honor Moore abandons a beloved country house for a city apartment with a view of a brick wall of inexplicable beauty, while Carol Muske-Dukes portrays an antiliterary, make-it-up-as-you-go L.A. that also somehow provides her with the necessary imaginative space to be a practicing poet. For Reginald Shepherd, displacement is itself a location. Paul Lisicky investigates his love for the hopeful promise of the suburbs of the early sixties and the inevitable betrayal of those prospects. Home is betrayed, too, for Andrea Barrett and Carmen Boullosa, who chronicle the deeply revised experience of life in New York after September 11, the apparent solidity of the city compromised, a new space opened where something familiar once stood. Barbara Hurd also confronts a hole in the world, the deep silence and darkness of the cave, a place that invites the deepest confrontation with fear and somehow also comprises a sacred space. There are other portrayals of refuge here: Terry Tempest Williams's desert defending itself against a ruinous drought, Mary Morris's welcoming subways, Bernard Cooper's imagined and longed-for Manhattan, capital of Art. Rafael Campo conjures a Cuba built solely from family stories and dreams. These refuges may be lost places, like Elizabeth McCracken's Jewish Des Moines or Victoria Redel's memory of a strangely comforting body cast. And lost places may be recapitulated: the safe havens of Kathleen Cambor's cemeteries and libraries recaptured in her work as a historical novelist, or Michael Joseph Gross's deep identification with his mother's powerlessness reconfigured in adult life. This is a diverse, rangy book; these writers walk around the questions at its core, deepening and enlivening them in the process. We're all trying to make a home, as we always have, trying to fit ourselves to the world, and the world to us. The heart of the matter is subtle, hard to name - perhaps simply because of the difficulty of standing back and looking at one's own times. But we can gesture in its direction: our sense of home, our understanding of what location means, has shifted, in the last few decades, in ways that trouble and invigorate at once.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Open House by Mark Doty Copyright © 2003 by Mark Doty. Excerpted by permission.
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