Tag: writing

Emily Badger’s Awesome Paragraph About an Old Map and the Retrospective Politics of Place

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments

This may sound counter-intuitive, especially given what’s happening in my backyard: I don’t hate the suburbs and I don’t have a hip, a priori antipathy toward life there.  After all, as John Updike and Nick Andopolis remind us, suburban basements are where rock stars come from.

That said, I believe that walkable, green cities are the way forward and that the growth of the suburbs over the last 50 years had little to do with free market choices and everything to do with government subsidy. I believe in living in and working in the City, because I believe in what the City was and what the City can be.  I believe these things are important because I believe the systemic poverty and educational challenges our urban cores face can be overcome if enough people give a damn.

But I don’t share Atlantic writer Emily Badger’s coming-of-age urban experience.  I grew up mostly in a suburb of small brick houses that were built on a cornfield in the 50s.  Not exactly John Cheever’s or Don Draper’s Ossining.  But I do happen to love these paragraphs from Badger this week, especially the second one:

My map – “a map of the British and French dominions in North America, with the roads, distances, limits, and extent of the settlements” – is inscribed in the lower right-hand corner, inside an elaborate inset of palm fronds, plump angels and supplicating natives, by the Earl of Halifax’s most obliged and very humble servant, John Mitchell. His world dates to 1755.

The United States doesn’t yet exist. We haven’t yet decided what we’re going to call the Great Lakes, or whether we want to honor the Indians who named them first. Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia all theoretically extend inland more than a thousand miles in hand-colored stripes of fading pink, green, and yellow. To the north, the pink patch that is New York expands greedily all the way to Nova Scotia. Opposite the Atlantic Ocean, the map ends abruptly at the 107th meridian west, beyond which Mitchell runs out of things to say.

I love this map for one miniscule reference that speaks to a modern geographic rift John Mitchell never saw coming in the 18th century. Just below the Great Falls on the Virginia shore of the “Potowmack” River, in something like 4-point type, he notes the existence of a port town sizable enough in 1755 to warrant mentioning to the Earl of Halifax: “Alexandria.”

Across the river, the District of Columbia does not yet exist. There is nothing there worth mentioning. And this is Exhibit A, the place where I begin my argument. See, Alexandria was here first, in the pre-Revolutionary age of the Iroquois and the unknown West. Clearly, it can’t be a suburb.

Read the rest here.

The Knitting Circle, Goodreads, and My Grammy

~ Chris Cocca ~ 3 Comments

From 2012.  Still true.  In the intervening time, I’ve done some of things Grammy did. I understand more.  I understand better. 

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I got this in my inbox today.

Of all the social media services I use, Goodreads is the one I clearly use  least.

I finished those last 46 pages in 2009.  In August of that year, I started my first fiction workshop at The New School, taught by Kitting Circle author Ann Hood.

It’s impossible to overstate the impact Ann had on our class.  She’s an amazing teacher, graceful and assertive in the kind of measures that let you know you have work to do, and that she believes you can do it.  The cadre of writers I met in that setting will say the same thing.  Those peers became friends in the course of Ann’s workshop, and those friendships were strengthened over the course of the next two years.

In the last 1020 days, I have, indeed, finished reading The Knitting Circle.  I’ve studied under Ben Taylor, James Lasdun, Robert Antoni, and Jeff Allen. I’ve worked alongside amazing emerging talent and have been blessed to call these people friends. I can’t say enough about what each of these people have given me or what their influence means to me.  I know I can finish what I’ve started because of the experiences I’ve had which each of them.

In May, I’ll celebrate the one-year anniversary of my MFA.  By then, I will have completed a draft of the novel I started halfway trough that program.  My grandmother, a key inspiration for that work, passed away this week. One of many great things you learn from Bob Antoni and Ben Taylor is that grandmothers are the keepers of our stories.  Theirs is the language of home.  Through Grammy, I’m connected to worlds I’d never begin to understand otherwise.  Grandmothers are emissaries from history, bridges between eras, nurturers of the present, caretakers of the future.

Whatever Ann and James and Bob and James and Jeff taught me, Grammy taught me first. She bought me books and encyclopedias, told me stories from her family on the farm.  She read us Laura Ingalls Wilder. She gave us a vernacular.  She helped run a business and she raised a family.  An extended family.  So much of who we are is simply her.  So much of who I am.

What else can one say?