This purpose of this blog is to document my first year post-MFA. During this year I will be working on a project about my grandmother's land in western Mass. which will be sold to developers in the fall, but the idea for this project came two years ago from Nathaniel Hawthorne's description of the New England woods in his novel "The Scarlet Letter." This landscape has absolutely confounded me since I up and moved to western Mass. for one summer when I was fifteen after reading Hawthorne's book. The first issue to confront in this project is the question of "place"? Can a site exist in reality in an American culture in which site-specificity is readily fabricated? (Example: I went to a restaurant last night in suburban Chicago that was like a theme park--complete with faux tarnished mirrors and "worn" tables). So I started this project by rereading Miwon Kwon's "One Place After Another" (published in October Magazine in 1997). One of the main questions to face in this project is outlined by Kwon in the last paragraph of her essay, "What would it mean now to sustain the cultural and historical specificity of a place (and self) that is neither a simulacral pacifier nor a willful invention?"
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