Writing Home in a Global, Digital Age
By Gracy Olmstead
There is more than one way of writing home.
In the proverbial sense, we pen letters and emails (and perhaps Facebook posts) to audiences we associate with that word, “home”, keeping connections strong through strands of thought, persuasion, intimacy. At other times, we “write home” by writing of home, describing the geographic locations, the specific latitudes and longitudes, flora and fauna, that we love.
For some writers, such as Henry David Thoreau, “writing home” conveyed both meanings. Many Americans know that Thoreau wrote of home in the second sense, as his famous book Walden attests. There are few other works so dedicated to anchoring words in place. For Thoreau, home was beyond description, yet he spent a lifetime trying to convey its changefulness, beauty, and worth.
But Thoreau also “wrote home” in the former sense: he was constantly writing for the people he loved in Concord, Massachusetts. This was one of the things, in fact, that Ralph Waldo Emerson faulted Thoreau for in an obituary penned after his friend’s premature passing: while others would wander far and wide, exercising leadership in a more grand and sweeping sense (Emerson included), Thoreau seemed quite happy—too happy, in Emerson’s opinion—to focus his attention on the place he loved.
While many associate Walden more with withdrawal from society than with a love of community, the book was in fact dedicated to a specific audience: to Concord, and more specifically, to the Concord Lyceum. Thoreau was an active participant in the Lyceum throughout his lifetime, biographer Laura Dassow Walls writes. In addition to writing and delivering speeches to his local Lyceum audience, Thoreau also worked as a Lyceum curator, arranging lectures and communicating with potential speakers. In fact, Walls believes that most of Thoreau’s writings were forged for and through Lyceum speeches. Perceptions of Thoreau as antisocial are misinformed, she suggests. He was, indeed, painfully shy and awkward. He struggled to make new friends. But he loved Concord and was constantly thinking about its human and nonhuman members—writing for them, to them, and alongside them. His huckleberry picking parties, his time in Concord’s jail (refusing to pay taxes in order to protest slavery and the Mexican American War), and his speeches and books all orbited this local world, part of his efforts to persuade and inform the people he loved.
Why care about Thoreau’s home-focused writing in our own context and time? I would suggest that Thoreau’s example matters to us because we’ve stopped believing that “writing home” matters in both the above senses.
We’ve bought Emerson’s condemnation of Thoreau hook, line, and sinker. We’ve stopped believing that writing or thinking in the context of a home audience matters. The bigger the audience the better. Local and midsize regional newspapers are struggling to stay afloat. Local politics are unglamorous and often unconsidered—especially when contrasted to the United States’ flashy, controversial presidential politics. In our personal lives, the importance of a post on social media is generally measured in its virality or “influencer” status.
Secondly, because we’ve invested our sense of worth in a national or global audience rather than a local one, we don’t pay enough attention to home in all its diversity, mystery, and importance. We easily take home for granted. It slips past us unnoticed, unless or until troubles and perils force us to pay attention. We can easily forget that our homes are changing, growing—even, perhaps, suffering—around us. The work of “writing home,” then, remains the important and undervalued work of thinking deeply and carefully about the particular places in which we live. Some of the most important environmental stewards and social activists of the 20th and 21st century—individuals like Wendell Berry, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Dorothy Day—have focused their writing and activism not just on large national and global battles, but on the health and wellbeing of their local communities, local politics, and local ecology.
In Walden, Laura Dassow Walls suggests, Thoreau wanted to convince local readers to consider home as a splendorous ecosystem: a web of human and nonhuman life, including pond and forest alongside street and house. He urged Concord citizens to expand their vision of home even as he focused it within a limited radius. He thus wrote “home” in order to challenge popular understandings of the term, in an act that was critical even as it was immensely loving. This is the big challenge of writing about place, and it suggests that there is far more work to do in building conversations in and around the subject of home. As Wendell Berry has written, “to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.” I would suggest that we can all build this local knowledge, and therefore also build our love for our homes.
Gracy Olmstead is a journalist who focuses on farming, localism, and family. She is the author of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Christianity Today, among others. A native of rural Idaho, she now lives outside of Washington, DC, with her husband and three children.
