Today’s episode is guest hosted by Maggie Smith.

Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

At one point in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, the narrator says, “If you don’t know where you are, you probably don’t know who you are.” In college, I underlined this sentence in my copy of the book, because it rang so true. It still rings true. I’ve lived in Central Ohio all of my life. Being rooted in this place is a big part of who I am.

When I first started writing poems, I wondered if I would need to move, or at least have some grand adventures, so that I’d have material. I’d grown up in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. Nothing all that “exciting” had happened to me.

I know now that writing doesn’t come only from experience, it comes from empathy and imagination. You don’t need to be someplace new to see—or hear, or taste, or smell, or feel—something new. That can happen right in your own backyard. Part of what I need to do to make a familiar place interesting is to never let it be the same place to me. That means trying to notice things I didn’t notice the day before.

Today’s poem feels like a “wish you were here” postcard. It makes me wonder how I would describe where I live to someone faraway, what details I would include. What in my familiar world might woo them to join me here.

Things I Want to Tell You About California
by Barbara Costas-Biggs

I know you’re tired of hearing about it: the perfect 
weather, how I stood on a five-gallon bucket to reach
oranges hanging over the fence from the neighbor’s
tree, the meal I made with food from the farmer’s market–
even the mushrooms they called maitake, 
hen-of-the-woods where you grew up,
growing at the base of trees, probably in the gully
behind your parents’ home.

I know I can’t make you love the things
that I do, but can’t you see there is a river here?
It runs through the town. A bridge arches over it.
The mountains are like hills, sometimes scrubby,
sometimes covered with the labyrinthine
green of grape vines, not the kudzu threatening
to cover what seems like all of Kentucky.
Red-winged blackbirds sit on fenceposts and rise
from tall grasses, test the hawks like toddlers
tugging at sleeves just like we’ve watched from the window
of our car as we speed past bachelor’s buttons
and black-eyed Susans on the roadside at home.

I know you won’t change your mind and give
it a shot across the country. You are grounded
to these hills, to the Ohio and East Tygart, to the gilt
of a late summer sunset. I’ll try not to fixate but I make
no promises. My mother called last night to tell me
all the roses in Napa are blooming, They’re fat like peonies,
she said. I repeat her to you and add I miss having 
peonies in the yard and you said, We’ll get you some.