Three elements are central to my writing practice: finding a deep personal experience, locating the place, and learning more about the hidden and enduring stories that grow within that space. I never set out to write about place as a focal point because to me it's always there. I write about memory and displacement. I'm drawn to a certain situation. Not the place, but a peculiar position, at times precarious, spots where I also find myself curious, in awe, surviving. They came naturally in my childhood, intensely throughout my youth. My solitary experience in the mountains, countryside, islands. My experience with homelessness in my youth, and life abroad sustained that interest. Writing was a sanctuary; journaling as way finding.
Today, I use Google Earth. Other apps on terrain, lidar, climate, news, allows me to map the area's natural history--places where I've been, places I've written about--and focus on details that intrigue me, that speak to each other in odd ways. To me, it was never a choice between my feet and technology. They have a common language in which they interact--my deeply felt experience as living history.
There's a wooded patch on a hill in San Francisco Jack and I hiked more than ten years ago. There's a branch swing on a slope and that's one of my favorite photos of my husband. That wild place is located between the Juvenile Probation Department and the historic and embattled Laguna Honda Hospital shut down recently.
Trauma. Water. Trees. Theme is something I find along the way while writing the essay. Same with patterns along with dead end corners and corridors. Death and grief are present and so are joy and hope. OpenSF History has the best collection of digital historic photos mapped by neighborhood. The San Francisco History Center on the sixth floor of the Main Library, as well as the Bancroft Archives are favorite places I can't wait to visit again.
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