The New Work of Composing

In his book, The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton (2006) wrote that we are "for better or for worse, different people in different places" (p. 12). Architectural elements help create environments we physically occupy; your home is not simply where you reside—it is also a state of mind. We experience emotional connections to locations. As Winnifred Gallagher (2007) explained, “Some places just feel like home. As soon as you walk through the door, you want to stay. You want to curl up by the fireplace, throw a party in loft space, lounge on the old porch, or follow that staircase wherever it goes” (p. 3). We feel at home amid our things placed strategically around us to make us comfortable in what otherwise is simply four walls. I briefly lived in Paris between my undergraduate and master’s program and loved hotel entryways, Pont Neuf and the wrought iron gates of Castel Berenger. But my small, crowded apartment above a sandwich café also contained parts of my Southern girlhood through recipe books, pictures of my family, and a quilt made of scraps from clothes my granny made for many generations of women in my family. Meanwhile, I could see the Eiffel Tower from my window.

I'd wanted to go to Paris for as long as I can remember. I'm not sure how or when Paris entered my imagination, but it soon came to represent adventure and freedom. I pored over books full of landmarks and museums. I studied the arrondissements, the metro stations, and routes to places I imagined as full of a kind of magic, a magic I wanted to experience. In high school, I took French instead of Spanish or German and joined the French Club knowing that somehow I would get to Paris. When I finally arrived in the midst of a tumultuous relationship, the allure I once envisioned of this place I loved so fiercely in my mind faded into confusion and vulnerability. My personal life and my connection to Paris were in question. I was significantly and painfully out of place. The landmarks of Paris like the Eiffel Tower still pulled at me, as did my yearning for the familiar smells of home, cornbread and honeysuckle instead of yeast and wine. I resided in Paris for months, torn between my fantasy of it and the place itself, stuck between the home I knew and the apartment in which I lived. I was overcome with homesickness in ways I'd never experienced before. At 22, I had never been alone in the way you are alone when traveling somewhere new. I became more aware of my surroundings and walked the city with determination to experience Paris as it was, not as I'd imagined it.

Yi-Fu Tuan (2003) described place as a pause. “Place is a pause in movement […] The pause makes it possible for a locality to become a center of felt value” (p. 138). Being in Paris and later, in Illinois, created pauses where I could appreciate the place I grew up, the place that in some ways will always be my home.

I grew up in southern Alabama as a lover of stories. I loved listening to members of my family tell the same tales; each person would tell it differently. Some would whisper or emphasize a specific part of the story. I appreciated each perspective and the way details varied with each telling. For me, these stories are inextricably connected to place, to home. I remember listening to ghost stories on my great-grandmother’s front porch and shelling pecans in my grandmother’s kitchen, listening to them talk about their lives. When I recall their stories, I am overwhelmed with the smells of honeysuckle or the tastes of the kitchen specific to the South, the place of my childhood. I’ve always been intrigued by how my memories and emotions are connected to place. Though I did not realize how deeply embedded my own stories would become in this project, I find it necessary to share them. As a Southerner, place is intrinsic to my identity. As a Southerner in the Midwest, place is a question: to which place do I belong?

I began recording my experiences and questions through blogging in order to connect to the people and places I’d left behind when I moved to Illinois. Much of my writing focused on the new landscape and the emotions I was experiencing as a result. I wrote about how big the sky seemed without rows of pine trees or hills to fill the space between land and sky. The prairie was intriguing; the rain fell differently and filled the air with coolness in ways that never happen in Alabama. Much of my blogging was an attempt to reconcile these two distinct places that were both very much a part of my identity, representing both who I was and who I would become. It should not be surprising, then, that (like much of the rest of our lives) place, or at least the narration of place, moved to the screen as social media designers and founders picked up on users’ identification with place and communities built around places and neighborhoods. This webtext explores how we, as social media users, compose ourselves through place narratives, narratives that take the form of hyperlocal content.