Page 10 - the Noise March 2017 Edition

The Politics of Place:
by Susan DeFreitas
If you trust the gimcrack tourist traps — or many contemporary novels — not much has changed in the West since the Western. But in recent years, more nuanced narratives have made their way into print, and with them, more nuanced ideas about the US west of the Mississippi.
I fell in love with the Grand Canyon State in 1995, when I came to Prescott for college, and though I moved to Oregon in 2009, I still consider myself an Arizona writer — maybe because so much of my work is set there. In fact, some of the stories that first appeared here in The Noise (in a series entitled “The Wild West Water Wars”) later found their way into my debut novel, Hot Season (Harvard Square Editions).
Last November, on the Southwest tour to promote my book, I had the pleasure of sitting down with one of my favorite local authors, Michaela Carter, for a far-ranging conversation (which we continued later, via email) on writing fiction set in the West — and beyond.
DeFreitas: In a recent article for LitHub, Laura Pritchett — whose forthcoming novel, The Blue Hour, is set in Colorado — addresses some of the ways the New York publishing industry can overlook the nuanced narratives of the West in favor of less nuanced “Westerns.”
She writes, “For years, the West has been granted a single story, featuring a quiet and stoic man with broken dreams seeking justice by solving a crime or killing a bad dude in front of a gorgeous sunset-ridden backdrop. Minorities and women had no place in these stories, save to reflect something about the man. And most of all, the landscape was a friend, part of the glory of the American West.”
It occurred to me that my novel, Hot Season, is nearly the opposite — it’s the story of three young women, students at a college known for its radical politics, who are involved in the fight to save a local river. (The college is modeled on Prescott College, the river on the Verde.) Not only do women and minorities play central roles in the novel, it’s really more the story of a community than it is of any one person (and certainly not one stoic man). And while the landscape might be a friend in many ways, it’s also a place of peril, “a tinderbox piled high with dry pine” where any stray spark might set the place on fire.
Michaela, your novel, Further Out Than You Thought, is set in LA — which may be, literally, farther out than the setting of a typical Western, but it also has a strong sense of place in the West. What are your thoughts on Pritchett’s statement? Do you think it relates to your work?
Carter: Further Out Than You Thought tells the story of a young woman essentially stran- gled by Los Angeles as it erupts in the riots of ’92, and it ends with her leaving the city. She drives north all night and pulls the car over when she sees a woman filling a bottle from a spring in the hills outside Santa Cruz. The pureness of the land and the water offers her a fresh start.
The juxtaposition is typical: the West is many things to many people. For me, growing up in Phoenix meant weekend picnics in the Superstition Mountains with my family. After I got over my carsickness from the bumpy, twisting dirt roads, these picnics were a chance to discover the relatively untouched desert — the little streams, the poppies and the lupines and the cactus wrens.
It seems to me the land itself has a story to tell. It’s quiet and nuanced, and a writer has to listen and watch for a while to be able to tell it. The deserts and mountains and rivers of the West are so foreign to New York, where the majority of the publishers are housed. I think it’s hard for them to relate to the stories born of these fragile lands. So they choose the mythic over the real, the romantic ideal over the gritty truth.
DeFreitas: What are you working on now? And where is the story set?
Carter: My next novel, The Degenerates, is set in England and France, Spain and Lisbon be- fore and during WWII. Eventually, the characters make their way to New York. And when one of them, the artist Max Ernst, goes on a cross-country drive and discovers Sedona, he decides to live there. The novel ends with him waking up to the sun on Oak Creek, to the red rocks and the songs of birds. For him, after the horrors of the war, Arizona is a refuge. A miracle.
I’ve also begun writing a new book, set entirely in the woods of Oak Creek. And I can tell you there will be no aspects of a typical Western. There won’t be any quiet, lonesome man with his shattered dreams. But there will be a strong woman who knows and loves fiercely the wilds of Arizona.
DeFreitas: One of the things I loved about Further Out is the way you portray the “gritty truth” of LA — the one where a smart girl might work as an exotic dancer, supporting her aspiring-actor boyfriend, the one where tensions over police brutality might at any moment set the city aflame.
I think people tend to think of sense of place in fiction as being about landscape and description, and in some ways it is. But to me, sense of place is first and foremost about char- acter, because the people who inhabit different landscapes have different hopes, dreams, sensibilities, and sensitivities, not to mention different day-to-day concerns.
In Hot Season, the protagonist, Rell, has taken a real risk by coming west for college, to a school she can barely afford. Her working-class parents back in Pittsburgh don’t understand that decision, they don’t understand the way she’s fallen in love with Arizona — and they def- initely don’t understand why the fight to save this river has become such a big deal for her.
But I think anyone who has lived in Northern Arizona knows someone like Rell — someone who sought to throw off the status quo of wherever they grew up back east and fell hard for the Southwest, a region whose wild beauty is always in peril — someone who’s dug in her heels and decided to fight for it.
Carter: You are absolutely right. Living in Prescott, I’ve known more than a few women like Rell, women who fell in love with the West, the openness and the wild places, where they’re free to become someone new.
And I agree that place is so much more than a backdrop. In Further Out, I came to feel that the city itself was a character. We usually think of Hollywood as being this city of dreams, and it’s true that all of the main characters in my novel moved there to pursue music and acting, but the reality of living in LA changes a person. And never was that more the case, for me at least, than during the ’92 riots. When tensions came to a head and exploded, I knew I had to change my life. My novel’s protagonist Gwen has a similar experience.
DeFreitas: It’s interesting to hear about your next two projects. Further Out was so LA, and it sounds like your current project is very much grounded in AZ. What was it like to write the novel in between, in terms of its sense of place? (In writing it, did you have experience in European landscapes to draw upon? Or did the backdrop of wartime overpower some of those particularities of place?)
10 • March 2017 | the NOISE arts & news | www.thenoise.us