WEALTH OF IDEAS

This is one of those posts which satisfy some nostalgic hankering, while opening up creative possibilities. Oftentimes the writer within wants to keep talking about where he grew up, perhaps as a way of affirming, if not deconstructing, a sense of identity, itself a response to some stimuli in the immediate environment, such as, earlier today, driving to work, I saw a clump of trees on the side of Highway 99 that suddently recalled a simiilar feature along the Zvishavane-Murowa road, so I began to think about the setting of my stories, and remembered, perhaps for the hundredieth time, that my starting point tends to be Mototi, in Mazvihwa, Zvishavane, Midlands Province, Zimbabwe. All that is okay, a sense of place, specity of setting, which allows readers to see the familiar in the foreign, like how those trees along Highway 99 recalled Mototi. I often wonder why, with all these choices of setting, my stories still default to Mototi, and ignoring the obvious answer, I begin to make an ...

In my stories, I mention places, names, and concepts without always explaining them; I am driven by the belief that all places are equal, and that in them, life as it's known anywhere does happen. And if it's not familiar to some readers, it is still life in that story. I feel no obligation, therefore, to explain that Mazvihwa is a place near Zvishavane, which is a town in the Midlands of Zimbabwe. I will let a story about a Jakove, a Mukomberi, or a Sithole unfold, and expect the right reader to enjoy the story, or at least experience what Jakove experiences. But, in several workshop environments in the United States, there have been some cases of readers failing to make sense of a story because it has a name like Chimanimani in the first sentence, or lately, "Why didn't we know in the first sentence that SRB means Strong Rural Background?" etc... oh, then I sometimes will give characters names like Mai Vanji, Mukoma Chakuti: "What's that?" Of cour...

Even stories set in very local, very specific places like those by William Faulkner and John Steinbeck will find a new setting when I read them. And the landscape I create for them is always specific to me, retracing, or retracting to, places I have lived in, or ones I am familiar with. So right now I am reading Sweet Lavender by Terry O'Neal, and I give it a setting somewhere in Elk Grove, California, either because I know that's where the author lives, but, remember, that's where I work too. The story is set in Cecilia, Louisiana, I place I don't know. I am picturing a house outside of the place described by O'Neal, but it has all the features suitable for the story. It's now my setting, something pulled out of my experience living in specific places. It's a reader-created setting in agreement to the writer's specific or imagined setting. By reading this story, I am bringing a certain experience into it, refusing to only receive what it contains, but ...