The Lost Places of Childhood

Squinting back into the sunlit haze of my distant past, I recall a handful of hidden places that once meant everything to me. Childhood forts, magical spots, secret havens – whatever I call them now, it doesn’t capture what they meant to me back then.

They were places for play, for dreaming, for private ceremonies and spells. Each had its own atmosphere, its own rituals, its own particular scents and colours and associations. Summoning them up now, I’m back there in a flash.

Pooh Bear and Piglet, AA Milne

Spy grotto: a green gap inside an overgrown roadside hedge where my best friend Matt and I would hide to spy on passers-by, startling them with strange hoots and wild animal calls. We’d also conjure spells in there, using dirt, unearthed bones and the purple juice of crushed fuschia flowers.

Secret portal: a set of spooky old moss-covered wooden steps that led nowhere, a shadowy portal hovering in a gloomy pine forest. I half-hoped this spot would lead me into another world, like the wardrobe in the Narnia books, or Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole.

Climbing tree: I loved my beautiful climbing tree, with its glimmering silver leaves. But one morning after a big storm, mum held me up to the kitchen window to see my poor tree laying flat on its side, blown down by the wind. It was such a shock, to realise the things you love can just fall over.

Grass fort: a hollow in the long grass, where I’d lie back under the sky and daydream, surrounded by butterflies, tiny hopping money spiders, trilling cicadas and the scent of wormwood bushes. This blissful, private spot was on a farm we often visited, and I kept it entirely to myself.

All these years later, I still miss these special places. Recalling them now, I’m struck by a sense of loss and longing. And I wonder: when we grow up and lose our childhood havens, our secret boltholes and clubhouses, our forts and tree-houses, and all the private rituals we build around these magic sites…

I don’t believe we stop needing them. But what do we have to take their place?

Leucadendron Argenteum (Silver Tree)

This short piece is a teaser for a longer article I’m writing for Open Field magazine. All profits from sales of the iPad magazine will go to CARE Australia.

Aural escape tactic

When you want to be else/where… This site, NatureSounds, lets you pick four different nature sounds and remix them into your own customised relaxation soundtrack.

When your brain won’t stop buzzing, it’s hard to lull yourself into a state of rest, so I’m experimenting with audio tracks designed to switch off the incessant mental jabber. I’ve been boringly unwell, and getting better apparently involves taking enforced rest periods (which, to me, sounds a bit like “mandatory fun” or “compulsive spontaneity” – kinda counter-intuitive, and hard to get your head around.) But okay, worth a shot.

What’s the connection with place? Umm, let me see…using aural cues to emotionally relocate to an imaginative space? Escaping the here and now? Aural transportation? Yep. All that sort of thing.

Here’s my nature sounds mix: http://naturesoundsfor.me/load/embedded_player/LieDownAndListen.swf

Book preview: Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“The writer is an explorer: every step is an advance into a new land.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’m a sucker for a good-looking book, and this one’s a beauty, with an appealing cover, gorgeous illustrations, eye-friendly layout and lots of thought-provoking quotes peppered throughout. Even the paper stock is sexy – all cream-coloured and heavy. Mmmm. But I digress…

Peter Turchi is an author, scholar and teacher based in North Carolina. I’ve not read his fiction, but this non-fiction book is bursting with ideas about the connections between mapping and writing.

Here’s a snapshot:

> Just as maps use certain devices to help orientate us geographically, literature draws on comparable tricks to help us make sense of the world, and our place in it.

> Writing has two stages: exploration and presentation. At some point, the author switches from “Explorer” to “Guide”. That ole chestnut about taking the reader on a journey gets a brief mention, but hey, it’s apt.

> In marking the empty page, the author heads off into the unknown. To me, this uncertainty is part of the joy and anxiety of writing. Like Turchi, I suspect that if you plan too far ahead – “map the world of a story” too fully before you start “exploring” it – you can get either hedged in, or overwhelmed by the terrain. (He’s talking literary fiction here: screenplays, and certain genre works, might require more prior mapping, as their formulae are usually more rigid.)

> Gaps matter: a story must omit certain information, draw on white space and well-placed silences. These blanks, akin to blind spots on a map, are essential in fiction. They “help create the illusion that the reader is seeing only a glimpse of a much larger fictional world”. They also leave space for the reader’s own imagination to come into play.

> On the power of leaving stuff out, and revealing tempting glimpses, Turchi writes: “Our desire for shape, combined with our desire for surprise, explains not only the importance of careful selection but also the power of fragments.”

> Constraints are vital. A story is a kind of map, writes Turchi, in that it “evokes a world”. And like maps, stories are shaped not only by imagination, projection and distortion, but also by constraints.

Remember the Road Runner cartoons? Hand-drawn by the brilliant animator Chuck Jones, these much-loved vignettes were exercises in constraint, variations on a winning formula. Jones had ten strict rules that shaped Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner’s world. Here’s a sample:  Rule 1: The Road Runner cannot harm the coyote except by going “beep-beep!”; Rule 3: The coyote could stop anytime – if he were not a fanatic (Repeat: “A fanatic is one who doubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” – George Santayana); Rule 8: Whenever possible, make gravity the coyote’s greatest enemy.

> “Realism” is a clever trick, one Turchi likens to “perspective”, a visual distortion invented/discovered around 600 years ago: when we draw a road vanishing into the distance, to make it look “real”, we make the lines meet at the horizon. But in truth, of course, parallel lines do no such thing. Realist fiction performs a similar stunt: “Far from being ‘natural’ or ‘straightforward’, realistic works may be among the most deceptive, as they go to great lengths, heights and widths to conceal their geometric underpinning.”

> This book covers much more ground than I’ve sketched out here, but I’ll close with two quotes I like, which appear near the end:

“Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way. This is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for other people.” – Alice Munro

“Fiction’s geometry is what allows us to build ladders from the world we live in to the worlds we imagine.” – Peter Turchi

Turchi, Peter (2004). Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. Trinity University Press, San Antonio, Texas.