Serendipitous Wanderer's Blog

Deborah  Mutnick writes about a project involving her graduate students and a local school celebrating its 100^th anniversary.  Claiming that “[P]laces are sensuous, laden with the repetition of daily life” (626), she talks in detail about the way the project was implemented and its results. Mutnick uses the concept of the geography of writing and what Bachelard called “the poetics of space . .. the human value of the ‘space we love’” (628).  In this project, Mutnick and her students met with people who had either attended the school at some point or those whose children attended the school.  They wanted these people’s stories to be told, stories which “have always been told; we were simply rendering them more public, more legible” (632).

As I read Mutnick’s piece, I was reminded of the concept of place as character in literature.  In reading literature or watching film and television, often the location of the story is as important as the characters who people the story.  For instance, what would a story like Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist be without the bleak inner city of Victorian London or a television show like “Sex in the City” be if the city was Podunk, Anywhere?  Mutnick says that their intent was to “engage students and other participants in research and writing that, as Christian Weisser puts it, “’highlight the ways in which material forces shape what gets said, who gets heard, and how these forces have structured public discourse throughout history’” (642).

Recognizing that each place is changed with each person who occupies it, either temporarily or long-term, she says that the “driving force behind the project [was] inquiry into the meaningfulness of place, infused always with the identities of those who pass through, traveling elsewhere, coming and leaving, and the mysteries for us as we take our turn.  Tracing a place’s history to its transformative moments and the global origins of past and present members is a means of reading ‘the inscription of time in the world’ that Lefebvre says produces space” (64 3).

Reading this article, knowing that we will be “inscribing the world” through our work with the Norris Community, makes it even more meaningful.  Helping people tell their stories—stories of the time they spent in their community, how it shaped their lives, how they helped shape the community itself – and to have those stories included in the written history of the Norris Community is exciting and it is an honor. I can’t wait!