How Does Place Define You?
How Does Place Define You?
Musing on Dougie MacLean's "Caledonia" and wondering where your identity comes from...
It’s one of my favorite songs, and I can’t really tell you why. Here’s a YouTube of Dougie MacLean singing one of his best-known songs.
I think it’s that the words speak to some deep sense of me, asking probing questions about who I am and who I want to be. Caledonia is a love song for MacLean’s home in Scotland, written when he was on the road traveling away from his country and feeling like he was lost in a way, without his familiar terrain and people. The identity so deeply instilled in him that when he went away, he felt homesick for a core part of himself.
MacLean wrote the song in 10 minutes on a beach in Brittany, France. He was in his early 20s, traveling Europe, busking. He played the song for some Irish buddies that he was traveling with and then headed home the very next day.
But it’s written as a love song - passionate, longing, lyrical - and speaks to something deep in the people who know all the lyrics, which is a lot of people around the world. When I was in Scotland last summer, my daughter and I went to Hootananny’s in Inverness to hear Calum MacPhail perform. It was an AMAZING night - packed bar, sticky tables, the performer’s sweet dog at the foot of the stage as the northern sky faded to ink outside the pub’s front window. He played so many songs - but when it came to “Caledonia,” the whole place sang along.
“Let me tell you that I love you, and I think about you all the time…”
Each time I hear this song, I think about how it’s a ballad for a place. That the songwriter’s identity was so interwoven with the landscape, that he was overcome with emotion and had to express it. That he had to go home, to get back to the place where he felt most himself.
Do you have a place like that? A place that you feel most yourself?
I’m leading a writers retreat this summer that focuses on how place informs identity - and subscribers can receive a 10% discount on tuition!! Subscribe to learn more…and to grab some writing inspo.
I’ve always been from Michigan, and I love so much about my home. I love the Great Lakes. I love the friendliness of the Midwest. I love the forests and the rivers and I love the variation of the landscape the further north I drive. And when I lived in New York and Washington, D.C., I certainly missed all of these things about the place I came from.
But I’m not sure that Michigan is so deep in my bones that I can’t be away from it.
Recently, I watched the Netflix movie, “The Swimmers,” based on the true story of Syrian sisters Yusra and Sara Mardini, who escaped the war in their homeland. Carrying a dream of swimming in the Olympics, Yusra insists that she will only do so if she can represent her country. I marveled as I watched, wondering at her firm identity alignment with place.
To identify with a place assigns special meaning to landscape, to landmark, to memory. It’s an emotional identity. It may have nothing to do with the actual place, but more to do with how you engaged with it, how you interpret it, and who you left behind there.
But where we come from seeps into who we are, and who we choose to become. It’s a subtle thing. Did you know, the composer Frédéric Chopin identified deeply with his homeland of Poland? Political upheaval in the 1830s sent him packing; he never returned to his place of origin, but Chopin carried a jar of Polish soil with him. He died and was buried in Paris, but he left strict instructions to take his heart to Warsaw and bury it there.
That’s a pretty strong identification with place, if ever I heard one!
I invite you to ponder where your place is. What home means to you. How place has informed your identity. How you are who you are because of a place you have lived. And to write about it.
If you’d like to write about it with me this summer, I have ONE spot open in my Nova Scotia writers retreat, July 24-28, 2023. Subscribers will receive a 10% discount on tuition! Details here.
A few updates…
This season of the Make Meaning Podcast, where I interview authors and people in publishing, is coming to a close in April. The next few episodes feature Sara Bennett Wealer (March 10), Desiree Cooper (March 24), Minda Zetlin (April 7) and Tom Sleigh (April 21).
I’m launching a new season on Women’s Fiction Day (June 8) with a mashup of some great women’s fiction writers I’ve had on the show. The very next day, I’ll offer another episode, announcing the launch of Scotia Road Books, my new hybrid publishing imprint!! And then I’ll release new episodes weekly through the fall.
This next season will include some bonus content for paid subscribers and giveaways related to the authors I feature on the show.
And also, dear subscribers, stay tuned for an opportunity to meet up on Zoom in April, to write together, talk about building a writing career, and doing things YOUR way. Can’t wait to have a cozy chat with all of you!
Love to all,
Lynne