From Snorton’s Anthology of Dislocated Literary Composition (Abridged)
Chronology of Writing While Elsewhere: An Addendum

• 1880: Henry James attempts to write The Portrait of a Lady in Florence, fails to ignore the view.
• 1881: James relocates to Venice, where writing remains difficult due to… Venice.
• 1920s: Hemingway allegedly writes about Michigan while drinking wine in Paris, proving geography is a mood.
• 2014: Author writes about Paris while sitting in a Starbucks in China. Does not see Paris anywhere but in her mind’s eye and possibly in her teacup.
• 2025: Word Raccoon demands drums during May existential crisis. Writing on the sunporch about love, repression, death, and James’s preface. Cookies involved. (Editor’s note: the cookies were oatmeal raisin. Of course they were.)

I’ve been re-reading The Portrait of a Lady, or attempting to, but I keep getting looped back into James’s utterly unhinged and relatable author’s preface.

It’s a mini master class in both writing in general and on the importance of physical place (as in the actual location of your precious body, not place as in setting) to writing.

(Word Raccoon says she would appreciate more glitter here, and frankly, perhaps James would, too. This book is very cool and sophisticated. Just hang on – I’m gonna get you all hot and bothered, Word Raccoon style, below. It will be worth the wait.)

James talks in the author’s preface to Lady about writing the novel in Florence and Venice, as he had his previous serialized novels, but he says that these places are such big characters they are themselves universes meant to be written about and so it was no good for him to stare out the window hoping to find an image when the entire city was a world-class art museum.

I’d go further and say places like that are dangerous for writing a novel set elsewhere unless you totally ignore windows or writing outdoors.

I remember writing about Paris in China, and there was…a disconnect. Especially since I was in a Starbucks at the time. (I also tried writing outdoors there, but, you know…air quality. Nothing like flecks of black soot on your face as you write about a child and her sheep.)

If you’ve read Hemingway’s excellent A Moveable Feast, you know he says it seems to him that “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan.” I thought of that as we sat in the Luxembourg Garden eating lunch where he claimed to have “hand hunted” pigeons to eat. I wish I could’ve shared my crepe and red wine with him.

James isn’t quite saying the same thing about place, but it’s parallel.

And also, not enough people talk about where you choose to write can be nearly as important as what.

Like, when I write outdoors, my eyes and heart are on constant scan. The rhythm makes it into my writing. Squirrels? Their physical selves, their scampering. The cars that go back and forth. The time lapse stream of energy as people come and go with lattes in their hand.

Place affects what we write, what we can write.

At this moment I am writing on the sunporch waiting to go to the care facility where my mother is on hospice. My husband is mowing the lawn. My heart is both here and a thirty-minute ride away.

This post isn’t about place, not really, or my dear mother. Maybe you can tell me what it’s about while I mark time and begin despising cookies which, surprise, surprise, are not magical pills that let you forget what is happening.

I’m about to drop a poem below that will seem completely inappropriate and ill timed. For those who do not yet know Word Raccoon (or what it is to be a complex human even though you are one even if you refuse to acknowledge it): emotions, being human, the messiness of it all can coexist. No, must coexist. They just do.

You can get one of those trays for toddlers that separates the food: sliced strawberries here, hummus and pita wedges, there, but in the end, it’s all food.

I’m maddeningly distracted by James’s distraction by place. How did we get here? Forward, Word Raccoon!

Five Stars. Would Emotionally Obliterate Again.

I’m re-reading Portrait of a Lady
and I have questions.
Like,
do James’s characters make
eye contact
when they make love?

It’s a fair question. Just how deep does
the repression
flow?

You have to take delight

(and a blow torch)

in watching a glacier

thaw

to patient your way through
and yet,
I’m still enthralled.

(That’s a half rhyme. That’s allowed, right?)

But could I bear to be so

close

to

all I want
if his eyes are
squeezed

tight?

P.S. It’s not indecent to write during these times, it’s necessary. And yes, James would probably faint seeing patient used as a verb. That’s how the Word Raccoon interacts with literature, though, makes it her own.

Peace out.