A Sense of Place

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We’ve just come back from a three-week road trip through a handful of southern states: Texas to Mississippi, then Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and home again. It wasn’t intended as a literary excursion but there happened to be quite a few writerly references on the way, and quite a few books harvested from various bookshops. Can you wander into a bookshop and come out empty-handed? I can’t.

A few scribblers’ names marked our itinerary: Greg Iles in Natchez, William Faulkner and John Grisham in Oxford, James Lee Burke in New Iberia, Joe Lansdale in East Texas, where we started and finished our circular journey.

Which leads me to places of inspiration.

I haven’t read Faulkner since I moved to the United States, well before I knew anything about Mississippi, so I’ll leave him out of this blog. I’m familiar with a few of Greg Iles’s books and I’ve consumed a metric ton of Grisham’s, but in both cases I was more interested in the plot than the atmosphere. For me, sense of place is all about atmosphere. And the outsize role played in the story by setting and geography.

Both Lansdale and Burke have that in bucketfuls.

I’ll talk about Lansdale first because he’s closest to home, up the road. Edge of Dark Water, The Bottoms, and The Thicket, three personal favorites, are firmly anchored in the woods and waters of the Texas-Louisiana border, the banks and bends of the 360-mile long Sabine river, in the old lands of the Caddo. There are bridges now and paved roads, but you don’t have to look far to picture the creaky ferries that used to take the travelers across. The woods are dense and wickedly entangled, the stuff of tales to frighten and enchant, the swamps are stabbed by the ghosts of bald cypresses, and the wildlife is ever present—birds and fish, snakes and gators, fox and deer, raccoons and armadillos. There’s violence, nightmare, and love everlasting in the stories Lansdale draws on that rich canvas. It’s no coincidence that the three books I plucked out of his impressive catalog have young protagonists. Their eyes are still open to the wonders of nature, their minds able to wrap themselves around magic. When I sit on my porch in the evening, listening to the lapping of the lake, the cicadas’ sitar, or the velvety bats, I’m in Lansdale country. A place he knows very well indeed.

I’d read several of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books before realizing that New Iberia was a real place, twenty miles southeast of Lafayette, in Acadiana (Cajun country). The name struck me as made up (New Spain?). Little did I know… Nueva Iberia was founded in 1779 by Spanish colonists, the French called it Nouvelle Ibérie, the English came later. All around there’s rice and sugar cane fields as far as the eye can see (omnipresent in Purple Cane Road). Bayou Teche that flows through town, the color of café au lait, is wider than I imagined, straddled by drawbridges and lined with massive oaks so old some of them have names and mentions in the Live Oak Society Registry. If you’ve never seen one of these magnificent giants draped in Spanish moss, give a click here, the photos are amazing. Walking through New Iberia is like a treasure hunt with Burke’s books holding the clues and the maps. Here’s the bridge Dave crosses when he goes for a jog, here’s the city park where he catches his breath, then the gazebo where Alafair likes to sit, and the Evangeline theatre, the old houses with their backs to the bayou, the maze of cypress knees sticking out of he mud, the crumbling shacks and the crawfish restaurants, the pattern of light and shadow on the red brick roads. It rains a lot in the Robicheaux books. It was dry this time in May.

A sense of place in a writer’s work adds reality to a story, it gives flesh to the bones of the plot. When it’s combined with a recurrent character, the faithful reader feels right at home. This is the café where the protagonist likes to stop for a piece of pie and a chat after work. This is the school where she drops her kids. The cherry tree that the birds pick clean before anybody has had a taste of the fruits was planted by grandpa in 1960, or was it 61? The scene is set, the tale can begin.

I’ve used the same locations in several stories. It’s the same beach in Lily and Spy Head. The same suburban neighborhood in Perfect Day and The Spring. I’ve know both places for years. The corner of East Texas where I live now also features prominently in a bunch of stories. It’s where most of the action of my current work in progress takes place. After 25 years, I guess I’m dropping roots.