By Brandy Renee McCann
I found myself on the front porch of my mom’s house, watching her do laundry in a wringer washer circa 1993. We had rusty water from a bad well. So as not to stain our clothes, my mom caught rainwater in great big barrels and heated it on the stove top, buckets at a time. Then she packed the hot metal buckets to the washtub, one by one, until it was full enough to do a week’s worth of laundry from our large, intergenerational, blended family.
I remembered this scene while in a poetry workshop with George Ella Lyon. She had us draw the floorplan of a house—any house we’d lived in. Next, we had to pick a room; then draw the room in detail.
Although prompts can sometimes leave me feeling panicked and tongue-tied, I loved this exercise because it forced me to focus on a very particular place. In her book, What Comes Next, memoirist Abigail Thomas writes: “Assignments can give a writer a sort of side door into material too daunting to enter through the front, to face head on.” Bringing awareness to a fixed spot evokes so many sensory details: the rough concrete porch with a wide roof to block the midday sun, the scent of soapy water and wet clothes, the slosh-slosh of the machine’s agitator.
Similar place-based exercises often focus on one’s place of origin. Nature writer Janisse Ray recently shared a straight-forward one with her readers; she said, “write about the place where you are from.” Without thought I started to write about my hometown, but I quickly became blocked because I’ve written a lot about the place I grew up. I had to think of how to say something new. When I was in George Ella Lyon’s workshop, I realized I needed to focus not only on a place, but on a particular point in time on that porch. Its function and appearance has changed a lot over the 47 years of my life.
And so have I. Is the place I grew up still the same place I’m from? Who is this “I” that left her hometown nearly 30 years ago? Who am I now and where are my origins?
When I interrogated the place-based self, my writing opened up. Folklorist Sharon Blackie says that our journeys of self-discovery over the life course aren’t so much along a road where the past is decidedly in the rear-view mirror. Nor are we traveling in a meaningless labyrinth that leads to nowhere in particular. Rather, Blackie proposes, our paths in life are interconnected spirals where we are ever-expanding away from, but always in relation to, our places of origin across time.
I can write iterations of myself spiraling through time and space, including me as a teenaged girl watching her mom doing laundry on the porch in rural West Virginia—sometimes she is closer, and sometimes farther way. Another self is with her chattering at her baby boy on a stoop in a Texas suburb while they hand out candy to neighborhood children. And still another iteration is on a different porch, falling in love under a scalding summer sun, with a wad of lavender stems in her sweaty palms.
Read more of Brandy’s work here.
Brandy Renee McCann, PhD is a writer and social scientist whose work is focused on life in Appalachia. Her creative work has been published in Reckon Review, Still: The Journal, Change Seven, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, The Dead Mule, and other literary venues. Brandy’s scholarly, collaborative work on aging in Appalachia can be found in a variety of peer-reviewed journals including the Journals for Gerontology: Social Sciences, Journal of Rural Mental Health, and Journal of Family Issues among others. Brandy is a research associate and project coordinator at the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech. To learn more about the family caregiving research in which she’s currently involved, visit here: https://careex.isce.vt.edu. Her social media handle is appalbrandy.