Walking in Place

A hot Sunday afternoon in mid-August, my husband and three children out of the house. Giddy at being home alone, I can’t settle down to any of the things I’d like to do in the rare quiet left behind in their absence. So I go for a walk.

So begins my most recently published essay, "Walking in Place," which appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Stillpoint Arts Quarterly. I jotted down the first germ on an idea for this piece in April 2010. I completed a full draft in August 2015. Over the next year and a half, I revised it with input from my writing group. I sent it out on submission for the first time in February 2017. Over the next seven-plus years I sent it out 13 more times, revising it a bit here and there, letting it rest for long periods of time in between (I didn't send it out at all in 2021 or 2023). Finally, on the 14th submission, nine years after I completed a first draft, 14 years after first I first toyed with the idea, the essay was accepted and subsequently published in Stillpoint's "Walking" themed issue.

All this is to say is that--on top of the continual study of craft, the steady practice of putting words on the page, the self-discipline of sitting down and writing and rewriting words--writing, which is to say publishing, requires patience and persistence. Sometimes it pays off (though less often does it pay off literally). Sometimes it doesn't. I had all but retired this essay when I saw the call for submission that eventually led to its publication.

The reason I hadn't fully retired this essay was that, despite repeated rejections, I believed in it. The writing describes most honestly and accurately my relationship to the place where I live and to the place I come from. Last weekend I gave a reading at the local library for my book, Uphill Both Ways, and a member of the audience, who had already read the book, expressed surprise that I'd written within its pages that I felt "stuck in Maine." It had never occurred to her, she said, that anyone who lived in Maine felt that way. What a wonderful gift that would be, to exist in the comfort and certainty that the place you occupy on the earth is the place where you belong. Though there are many lovely things about Maine, I have never felt that way, as long as I've lived here, and I don't expect I ever will, even though I'll probably never live anywhere else. This struggle with a feeling of dislocation is what "Walking in Place" is about.

You can read the essay here and peruse the rest of the digital edition here, both for free. Or you can purchase a print copy here.