The Physicality of Place

During a panel at the 2019 Miami Book Fair, a woman spoke softly into the mic and asked Jill Ciment, Karen Russel, and Kristen Arnett about what it means to write about place. I felt my body move to the edge of my seat and I quickly took out my phone, hoping to be able to retain as much information as possible when they spoke. All three writers Florida residences, all three writing about Florida, and all three with different brilliant answers.

Ciment answered that as a Montreal native and someone who previously had lived in New York City it takes a long time before you can write about a place. Russel spoke of how writing where you lived can be hard. You want to get it right. Arnett, a Florida native, answered that place is a physical experience and when writing it should function as such. She said what does it feel like to move through a Florida summer? The muskiness that hits your tongue or the sweat pooling across your skin as you move. She spoke of the sound of cicadas and the annoyance that fills your body when you hear them. That yes of course you see place, but you also feel it, you smell it, you taste it.

Place is more than setting. It is not where the story physical happens. It’s the space between what is happening and where it is happening. Ciment is right, it takes a long time to write about a particular place. Russel is too, you want to get place right. But I think Arnett nailed it on the head.

“There is a physical experience of place.”

There is. When you step into a corn field in the middle of a spring evening in Northwest Missouri there's a buzzing. On your skin, in your ears, between your scuffed up flip flops. It's the way water pools in the rows that draws the mosquitoes and June bugs. A Colorado sunrise after a snowstorm is a warmth like none other, the blinding reflection of rays onto frozen water molecules can give you a sadistic sunburn if you stay out too long. Your skin starts to get hot around your face the way it does on a beach when you’ve forgotten your sunscreen, but you realize you’ve remembered too late. The road outside the Fox Theatre in downtown Oakland during October smells like popcorn, Chinese food, and T-shirt ink. The gentrification of the block feels heavy and you notice it the most when you get your artistic gelato. You should feel guilty. If you get stuck on the side of a riverbank in Bluff, Utah during mid-March, because you forgot that when you paddle board the San Juan River its best to have a car parked at the end point first so you'll be able to get home, there will be a group of Mormon Cub Scouts whose troop leader promptly tells the tall teenage boy to get in his truck and drive “you ladies” back to your campsite.

Write the peculiar ones, the normal ones, and all the places in between. But whatever you do, write the physicalness that place forces us all to experience.


Merkin Karr is a first year MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She loves standup paddle boarding, her dog Olive, and quiet hookah bars. When she’s not writing true crime she’s listening to podcasts or teaching herself how to snorkel. (One is going much smoother than the other).