Another school assignment I thought some of you may enjoy. So…enjoy!
The assignment was to write two pages answering these questions:
Where are you from?
What are your stories to tell?
Who are you writing for/to?
LOCATION
I am from Scottsdale, Arizona, a small city that abuts the capital city of Phoenix, Arizona along its western border, and connects to other smaller cities like Mesa and Tempe. You can tell who’s native here because we pronounce the latter temPEE, not TEMpee or, worse, temPAY like commentators are apt to do on television for our pro sporting events.
The term “small city” is relative. Phoenix proper recently attained 5 million residents, and at last check was the fifth largest city in the U.S. by population. The state clocks in at 7.2 million.
Until moving to Canada last year, I had lived in three houses total. No apartments, no dorms, and not including a few weeks here and there at my mother-in-law’s house in between buying or selling homes.
Forty-eight years old. Three houses. This sort of stat is true for very, very few people, I think.
I’m not ashamed of it. On the other hand, my 11-year-old has already lived in three homes, and one of those is in another country. I don’t mind that I didn’t move a lot, but I do sometimes wonder what positive and negative impacts it had on me. Certainly I accumulated a lot of stuff, and most of it is useless. I have toys from early childhood still. (Which, happily, are put to use by my children.) I think living in the same town my entire life instilled a sense of place in my heart, but also gave me a certain fear of change—even when change would be for the best.
Part of my reason for moving out of my country was specifically to get out of and hopefully alter (or at least interrogate) my Location. Just before leaving, I livestreamed a tour of my hometown, talking about memories and nostalgia; about lessons learned. What I realized at the end of the stream was that I could no longer be in the same city as the house I grew up in and still make forward progress in my own emotional well-being.
I owned a VHS video camera from sophomore year of high school through to after the turn of the millennium. Thus, not only do I have vivid memories of where I grew up because I lived in one place for so long, I also have literal, visual proof of what it looked like, what I looked like, what my family looked like; how we interreacted; and the ways in which that place affected me and continues to affect me today.
I lived on Windsor Avenue, just a block or so from the border of Phoenix. I had a large backyard and a large house. My mother and father both divorced their first spouses, and then had me, though I’ve learned recently the pregnancy was likely an accident. I have six older brothers and sisters who, when I was born, were being forced to live Brady-Bunch style in this house. The next-youngest is at least ten years older than me, so I have few memories of them. They were out of the house while I was very young.
Only later in life did I realize my family was wealthy while I grew up, at least by modern American standards, though we possessed few of the trappings of wealth. My parents drove the same cars for twenty years. They didn’t go out shopping or take expensive vacations (in fact, they rarely travelled). When I was young, we belonged to a country club, but while I did learn to play tennis and sometimes used the pool, fundamentally I did not fit in with the other kids there. Eventually we left the club, though I’m not sure why and will probably never know, because one Location my family shares is that of secrecy.
No—that’s the wrong word. It’s not secrecy so much as brushing all negativity under the rug and pretending (insisting!) that Everything Is Fine.
Especially when it is not.
But I grew up with enormous pine tress that I’d climb to the top of. This large back yard became the scene of fights with monsters, fights with pirates, wars with foreign invaders. (My early moral compass originated from 1980s action films, for better or worse). I climbed and swung and hid and spied. At 13, I missed the state record for pullups (18!) by one, only because I’d spent my whole life pulling myself up in my favorite tree in the yard.
I went to an ELCA Lutheran preschool, then to a Missouri Synod Lutheran school for K-8. The impact of those years cannot be overstated. The education was good, but the physical punishments were not. It was a small school with a graduating 8th grade class of perhaps 30. I had many enemies, but I also learned from one friend in particular the truest, deepest meaning of friendship that I carry to this day. This school, in hindsight, got many things wrong about childrearing and my education (this was 1979 to 1988), but they also got a few things exactly right: for instance, being given the chance to use a teacher’s VHS editing deck to make my first movie, or being the only student taken to Arizona State University’s “Young Authors Conference,” where I presented my 30,000-word fantasy, Derro The Warrior. I still have both the book and the movie. They were far too formative to let go.
After grade school, I attended a public high school (culture shock!), where I became a part of a group of chosen family. These are people who made deliberate choices to love me at my best and worst, and I them. This Location matters more to me than any physical locale. Later my Location became the intentional part of another family, which informs many of my choices today, particularly as it pertains to how I raise my own children.
My Location is the heat and sun and lack of rain. My Location is the little hills we call “mountains” because we (Phoenicians) have never seen the Rockies or Appalachians.
My Location is a time in U.S. American history before school shootings, Internet, cell phones, or Covid. It is decidedly European in descent (English, Swedish, and German), with the attendant ignorance of privilege that comes with such ancestry; my current Location is trying to understand, question, and repair that ignorance.
My Location is the first hand knowledge of violence enacted upon my body by my own hand and by others, and the lifelong repercussions of that violence.
My Location is alone, and I am grateful for that, because it is what fostered my imagination and led me to become a storyteller. And as a storyteller, I take my responsibilities to my readers very seriously, particularly if they are young. Particularly when I see myself in them. Too many of them.
I am happily from the 1980s and 1990s. I am from couch forts on Saturday morning, sugar cereal, and Godzilla movies on “World Beyond” (KPHO TV 5 Phoenix!) long before they were eviscerated on MST3K. I am from bike rides to Thomas Mall to go to B. Dalton and Waldenbooks and buy the newest Judy Blume. Or Stephen King. The aroma of ink and paper suffuses my being. I am from winning a bike at Your Movie House on the corner because I rented so goddamn many horror movies when I was far too young to be watching them.
The stories that are mine to tell are the stories of young people who were or are not seen. My stories are often about dismissal, which is different (and I argue, worse) than rejection. I am here to tell stories of fear, pain, loss, grief—and triumph in despite of them.
I write for the weirdos and drama department kids. I write for the punks and the outcasts. I write for the kids who were legally beaten in school systems and who knew instinctively that family in its truest sense was a selected relationship. I write for the abused, abandoned, and neglected. My goal is to give them escape and entertainment and confirmation of their trials; I want my work to tell them, Yes, I see you. You are safe here.
Because my earliest Location was the opposite of that. My later Location embodied it. I want to pass it on to anyone who needs it.
