Writing My Way Home
This post was written on March 17, 2016.
I was never able to write about southwestern PA until I left it. My earliest attempts at fiction, in my teens and early twenties, were always set in some vaguely imagined suburbia, never in a small town like mine. When I was that young, all I really knew about my town was that it was a place I was expected to leave. This unspoken assumption took root, signalling to me that a successful life was one lived away from home. I was never explicitly encouraged to do anything in particular, and I grew up with a sense that whether I became a lawyer or an actor or a scientist, the most important part was the leaving. This wasn’t the norm for teenagers in the area. Few young people went farther than Pittsburgh; fewer still moved permanently out of state.
I didn’t write about southwestern Pennsylvania until I moved to New York City for graduate school. College in Ohio had been temporary, but I knew in my bones that New York was a don’t-look-back kind of move. Strangely, although I felt a deep happiness each time my cab from Laguardia sped over the RFK Bridge after visits home, my writing became Pennsylvania-focused almost immediately. Only at this point was I able to see my hometown clearly, and to find the stories I hadn’t paid attention to while I was burning to get away.
Looking back now, I believe this was a way to stay connected to home, to figure out that piece of my life and what it meant, what I could take from it, how it had shaped me. At first, my imagination was sparked only by the truly provincial and kooky—the strange characters and offbeat small-town events I viewed with big-city amusement. In Each Vagabond By Name, the outsiders everyone calls “gypsies” seemed, in early versions of the story, less than fully real—the stuff of legends and fairytales, dreamy netherworlds operating outside of real life. As the novel grew over the years, however, that kookiness gave way to the stories and lives I was starting to understand, thanks to time and distance. The characters became more real only when I allowed their home to take on substance and gravity.
Don’t get me wrong: from Bigfoot sightings to the Rural King superstore to yinzes (a gorgeous pluralization of the already beautifully local yinz), southwestern Pennsylvania offers up its fair share of local color. But I don’t believe you can write compellingly, compassionately, about a place you don’t at some deep level respect.
It’s said that everyone has one story that they write over and over and over, and this is mine: I left. And it’s probably safe to say that the theme driving almost everything I’ve written is the risk and struggle inherent in leaving home. In Each Vagabond By Name, Ramsy tries—threatens—to leave, but ultimately can’t; but part of what makes him interesting is that Smelk is, in the end, not his place of birth but a place he chose, however randomly.
He is, at heart, an outsider, and the foundation of Vagabond is the tension between outsiders and long-established locals in a small, isolated town. That tension also permeates the larger questions in the book: What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to spend your life in one place? Are the people with roots somehow better than the wanderers, or are the deeply rooted people the ones lacking—adventure, courage, open minds?
I wrestled with these questions as a teenager as I made my first steps outward, into the larger world. I was certain, then, that I would never go back. I wanted to be like the wanderers in my novel—not thieving or desperate, but free—and some of that feeling remains in the local men’s brief moment of admiration for the outsiders’ travels. But as my early adulthood turned to later adulthood, with this novel always by my side, my feelings about home changed quite a bit. I left at eighteen and haven’t lived there since, but the idea of doing so has lost its sting and terror. In some ways, I had to write my way back home. I’ve lived a lot of places in the past twenty years, Europe and California and New York and New Jersey, but southwestern Pennsylvania still fuels my imagination like nowhere else.
