Clear As Mud
Everyone got two drinks with the price of admission, thank God. The subject of whether or not there is a distinct Northwest style or manner of writing is, you know, unbearably dull, and the conversation about it last Thursday at Richard Hugo House was semidry and essentially semantic: You began to realize that everyone can find Northwesty aspects in Northwest writing, but you can also find Northwesty aspects in, say, New Jersey writing, so the debate wasn’t so much over whether regionalism exists but what regionalism means. Still, the place was packed, and funny things were said, and Clark Humphrey acted a little drunk even though he probably wasn’t, and everyone else acted a little drunk because they were.
Lyall Bush, introducing the debate, said, “The usual forum of People who Know Things talking, and then people asking questions, isn’t necessarily fruitful, so we’re doing something different.” The event was called “The Regionalism Wrangle,” and there was a signup sheet for anyone who wanted to intervene in the conversation, which made me think, in my endless optimism, that it was going to be exciting.
Matt Briggs got things going, although “got things going” is overstating it a bit. He said things like “I don’t know if there’s a Pacific Northwest style or idiom or sentence, but I do think there’s a Pacific Northwest sensibility,” and he read from work by Ed Dorn (“The rain comes down softly, a soaking thing”) and by Tom Robbins (which he prefaced, witheringly, with, “I realize I might be pushing the idea of literature”), and he talked about how Mt. Rainier “speaks” to people. It was weird. Briggs seems committed to this idea of determinism: If you are from the Northwest, you will write like you’re from the Northwest no matter how hard you try not to.
I think that’s what he was saying. (Every time he got close to making a point, he wandered in another direction.) Bush was more articulate. He’s Canadian, and upon moving to New Jersey the first thing he noticed was that the stoplights in many American cities aren’t secured to poles but swing from cables. (“This was a land that was okay with swinging, and I mean that in all ways.”) He read from Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter” and from Anna Karenina and showed a slide of Hopper’s Nighthawks (“This could be the edge of any city 40 years ago, could be Belltown in 1958”) to argue, fairly convincingly, that writing is place-defying, that “the regions that people point to through language are not site-specific.”
Ultimately, Briggs and Bush agreed on something. It had to do with that “sensibility” word, which seemed conveniently vague. Then Ryan Boudinot and Diana George and other smart writers had their say, and Nick O’Connell (author of On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature) took the opportunity to plug his misguided book. Two hours in, the increasingly muddled conversation showed no signs of stopping and I was drinking on an empty stomach. So I left. I had places to be. Actual places.
