The Printed Newspaper, Books, and a Sense of Place
Our Sunday newspaper never appeared on our doorstep this week. My husband and I walked around the neighborhood looking to see if other households had received papers. No one had.
“Must be because of ice and snow,” I said. “We can read the paper online and maybe it will turn up later.”
“It’s not the same,” he said.
We read newspapers online all week, but on Sundays we spread out the New York Times all over the dining table, each having claimed our favorite sections. Peter likes to read the front page and news section first, while I peruse Business and Style.
Holding a newspaper, a magazine, a book in your hand is a different experience than staring at a screen and scrolling. We have a friendly bet each week, over the value of the three houses to be featured on the real estate page. I rate the Modern Love essay and read aloud any interesting advice questions posed on “Social Q’s.”
The newspaper arrived Monday. It is midweek and I am still perusing it. This tells me books will never die. Print is not dead. Good news for writers and readers who have coffee tables and book shelves.
What can you buy these days as a keepsake or memento of a place? One can only own so many mugs or T-shirts, but a book with pictures or a book with a story can remind you of an experience or an idea you are musing about. More books should be sold in souvenir shops. They sell plenty in airports.
I’ve got books on the brain. I’ll be publishing one before the year is out, in paperback, and I promise it will be affordable because books are meant to be purchased, read, and shared. Maybe I’ll reveal the cover next week, so please sign up to follow this blog if you haven’t already done so.
In the meantime, I’d like to share with you a novel I’ve really enjoyed, North Woods by Daniel Mason. Among the literary set I’ve been hearing “sense of place” repeatedly as something editors are on the hunt for when selecting work. Several magazines: Several magazines: The Common, Terrain, The Fourth River, and Orion, specifically look only for pieces that convey “a sense of place.”
In Mason’s North Woods, a certain patch of land in Western Massachusetts is the focal point that informs the actions and emotions of the characters in the stories, songs, and poems that comprise the book’s content. The timeline is stretched out across centuries, commencing in pre-colonial America and reaching into the twenty second century. I enjoyed the descriptions of the trees, ferns, and wildlife told from multiple perspectives so much that I was sad when the narrative ended and had to re-read the last chapter again.
The use of the land as the element that connected the storyline, caused me to think of additional ways I could bring “place” into my storytelling. So here are a few writing prompts for writers to try.
WRITING PROMPT:
Think of the place you call home. This place is not necessarily where you currently live, it’s the place you most desire to be and keenly know.
Describe that place, using all five senses. What does it smell like? What stands out visually to you? What sounds do you hear? What does your special home taste like? When your feet touch the ground, what do you feel?
Now imagine someone else, different in three ways from yourself, is visiting the place you just described as special to you. Make them different in age, sexual orientation, cultural background, profession, religion, value system, agility, education level… you choose at least three.
Now write about that new character, different from you, interacting with the place you call home. What would they notice? Would they like it there or would they try to change it?
You might get a story idea from this prompt, or maybe not. Whatever ensues, remember the more you write the more you can learn about the process.
Have a great week and thank you for reading. If you are interested in sampling more of my work, I just updated my website with more content and links to work published in the past two months. One item that has not been added is a piece of flash fiction, “Maggie’s Gift” that was a longlisted entry in The Sunlight Press 2023 Flash Fiction contest. This week it kicked off their week of daily Flash Fiction and you can read it here.
Originally published at http://nadjamaril.com on January 25, 2024.
