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June 15, 2003 By Uncategorized

The Ecotone wiki, a collaborative project by bloggers who write about place, gets it’s official launch this week with a collection of essays about how we all came to write about place.

My contribution, from my Bowen Island Journal, is about how I began to see the world through the eyes of an exile while I was living in England as a kid. Others at the Ecotone wiki seem to also be drawing on both their childhood experiences and experiences of moving, and being dislocated as some point in their lives. I think it is this dislocation that gives us the lens through which we come to see the place in which we live.

Fred First in Floyd County, Virginia, USA puts some legs on this idea, and its implications, in his post:

When we write about place we explore particular coordinates of geography and landform and private experience, guided by our own life maps, seen through lenses that can bind me to your world across the globe’s wide curve. And doing so connects us person to person, territory to territory, pulling real places from the representational map that is the internet. Can this writing about place bring us into each other’s world, build community? I trust we will see.

I write about place to invite strangers to know and understand my world, perhaps to see their world differently having come here, with new and useful landmarks on their maps when they leave. So perhaps I write, too, as a an open page of hospitality, a way of saying “my house is your house, and my creek and valley, likewise”. Maybe I think and write about place because, as I believe Wendell Berry has suggested, if you don’t know where you’re from, you won’t know where you’re going. In some small or great way, it may be possible in writing on this topic to help each other know where we’re going by better understanding the places from which we have come.

We will be writing once every two weeks on a different topic. Feel free to join us.