This is the third and final installment on writing about place. You can read the first installment here, and the second installment here.
36. Tell the stories of the place writing history, folklore, science, profiles, etc. as appropriate.
37. Allow the place to speak through description (of place), memoir (your own experience of the place), profiles (of people related to the place), and processes (in the place).
38. Write about your experiences in and of the place – what you do in relation to the place, and what the does place to you.
39. Why does this place speak to you? What does it say?
40. Write about how the place has changed you.
41. Write about someone else, and their experience in and of the place.
42. Write about the same small piece of ground through all the hours of the day, all the seasons of the year, across a decade, across a generation, across a century, across the ages. What changes and what stays the same?
43. Write about the geographical, geological, ecological, and historical elements of the place.
44. Write about what the place is and does, the processes that take place there: what happens in the forest ecosystem; what goes on in the city; what takes place on the farm; etc.
45. Write about the history of the place – what happened there in the past. What are the "ghosts" on the landscape? What do we know about the past of the place; about its present condition; about its future prospects?
46. Write about what moves in the place, about what stays motionless, and why?
47. Write about the patterns you see in the place? Where do you see them from? From the air, for instance, you notice how the roads follow the rivers, something you might not notice from the ground.
48. Write about this place's relation to other places; about other places' relation to this place.
49. Write about this place's relation to people; people's relation to this place.
50. The story of the place is in its water, minerals, plants, animals, people; and the processes in which/through which these interact.
51. Write about adaptation, about how things have had to adapt to the place, that is, how the place has changed them.
52. What are the dangers and the comforts of the place? Where do the dangers arise? Of what are the comforts made?
53. Inventory the "contents" of a place: name the things of the place; explain what they are and how they are used.
54. Write about artifacts indigenous to the place.
55. Write about the "character" of the place – what seems to make it what it is. How it got to be that way. How it is going to be.
56. Write about the "characters" of a place – those who make a place or community what it is.
57. Write about the significant local events which occurred in the place within living memory.
58. Tell how the place got its name.
59. Write about competing and conflicting uses of land; about competition for the place.
60. Write about settlement patterns.
61. Write about the landscape's effect on the development of land.
62. Write about development's affect on the landscape.
63. Consider the measure and meaning of the sounds and the silence of the place?
64. Write about the colors, patterns, movement, smells, and sounds of the place. Details should support the narrative and the theme; select appropriate details – e.g. you don't usually select dark details for an upbeat theme.
65. What research can you do that will help you better understand the place and your experience of the place? What are you leaving out about the place because you don't know? What don't you know that you should?
66. Who can you talk to in order to more fully enter/understand the place? Interview them.
67. What information about the place do you have at hand which gets in your way telling the story of the place – discard it.
68. Noted in reading: Paul Gruchow in "Wild Isle" from his Boundary Waters: "Places can be claimed but never conquered, assayed but never fathomed, essayed but never explained. You can only make yourself present; watch earnestly, listen attentively, and in due time, perhaps, you will absorb something of the land. What you absorb will eventually change you. This change is the only real measure of a place."
69. Noted in reading: Gary Snyder, in The Practice of the Wild, talking about native peoples in Alaska: "The place-based stories people tell, and the naming they've done, is their archeology, architecture, and title to the land."
70. Suggested reading: books which may help you understand place and the relation of people to place: William Least-Heat Moon, Prairy Erth; John McPhee, The Pine Barrens; Farley Mowat, People of the Deer; and Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.
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