Excerpt from Open House: Writers Redefine Home

From the Introduction by Mark Doty:

So where do I live? I don’t have a ready answer, but I’ve realized there’s something I like about not having an answer. Something of that spirit – a curious, open engagement with the now, in its slippery and uncertain character – animates this book. Some version of my question lies behind each of these essays; they are complex responses to a strange place and time in which to find oneself. Sometimes home is found in unexpected places: Honor Moore abandons a beloved country house for a city apartment with a view of a brick wall of inexplicable beauty, while Carol Muske-Dukes portrays an antiliterary, make-it-up-as-you-go L.A. that also somehow provides her with the necessary imaginative space to be a practicing poet. For Reginald Shepherd, displacement is itself a location. Paul Lisicky investigates his love for the hopeful promise of the suburbs of the early sixties and the inevitable betrayal of those prospects.

Home is betrayed, too, for Andrea Barrett and Carmen Boullosa, who chronicle the deeply revised experience of life in New York after September 11, the apparent solidity of the city compromised, a new space opened where something familiar once stood. Barbara Hurd also confronts a hole in the world, the deep silence and darkness of the cave, a place that invites the deepest confrontation with fear and somehow also comprises a sacred space.

There are other portrayals of refuge here: Terry Tempest Williams’s desert defending itself against a ruinous drought, Mary Morris’s welcoming subways, Bernard Cooper’s imagined and longed-for Manhattan, capital of Art. Rafael Campo conjures a Cuba built solely from family stories and dreams. These refuges may be lost places, like Elizabeth McCracken’s Jewish Des Moines or Victoria Redel’s memory of a strangely comforting body cast. And lost places may be recapitulated: the safe havens of Kathleen Cambor’s cemeteries and libraries recaptured in her work as a historical novelist, or Michael Joseph Gross’s deep identification with his mother’s powerlessness reconfigured in adult life.

This is a diverse, rangy book; these writers walk around the questions at its core, deepening and enlivening them in the process. We’re all trying to make a home, as we always have, trying to fit ourselves to the world, and the world to us. The heart of the matter is subtle, hard to name – perhaps simply because of the difficulty of standing back and looking at one’s own times. But we can gesture in its direction: our sense of home, our understanding of what location means, has shifted, in the last few decades, in ways that trouble and invigorate at once.

MARK DOTY
New York City, 2002

Copyright © 2003 by Mark Doty. All rights reserved.