Reading, writing...that's what I do.

Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place

Titles can’t be copyrighted, so I am using one created by Native American writer, Louise Erdrich. Her piece appeared in The New York Times Book Review of July, 1985. I’ve read it many times, her words matter. Because for writers, it is always about the words, and it is often about the PLACE.…Where You Live and Breathe.

Louise Erdrich writes:

In a tribal view of the world, where one place has been inhabited for generations, the landscape becomes enlivened by a sense of group and family history. …a traditional storyteller fixes listeners in an unchanging landscape combined of myth and reality. People and place are inseparable. 

One of my novels takes place in a Northside neighborhood of Chicago, a crowded older area abutting the shores of Lake Michigan, like Rogers Park. I lived there while in college. But writing allows my imagination to alter things, place my Southside house there with all the elm trees that once lined our block, where hopscotch squares filled the sidewalks and my bike was an imaginary pony I rode around familiar city blocks:

She ran, feet slapping on sidewalks, one cement square worn, another fractured with prickly weeds breaking through, the straight-on Chicago blocks of this Near North Side neighborhood. Step on a crack? Break your mother’s back. …Change endemic to living, and it happening here, block after block, street after street, yet the place still familiar, like lines on her palms…  

 If our characters are formed by place, they can also alter place. Erdrich is right—people and place are inseparable, so many places that were and still are part of my life, my writing. 

CHANGE VERSUS IMMUTABILITY 

Erdrich’s essay presents a challenge to writers. She asks that we compare her beginnings, her native culture, with our modern one. Because in our culture, if we are not satisfied with the landscape, we eventually use our power to alter it. This despite the fact that the land has always depended on us for protection.

Erdrich writes: As we know, neighborhoods are leveled in a day, the Army Corps of Engineers may change the course of a river. In the ultimate kitsch gesture of culture’s …a limestone mountain may be blasted into likenesses of important men. (Yes, but we must hope that only if those men CARED about America and not just about themselves.)

We need to remember a major aspect of Western culture–its mutability…nothing, not even the land where we live and the work we do stays the same. Erdrich writes: . …it is therefore, as if, in the very act of naming and describing what they love, they lose it. 

She supports this thesis using literature, like Faulkner’s “The Bear,” a story set in a wilderness that is doomed to disappear: …”gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness.” 

The pioneers felt the need to find the land, name that land and then consume it, tame it, using more and more modern farming methods that did irrevocably change it. When Erdrich states that the course of a river can be changed by the Army Corps of Engineers, she wonders if …our suburbs and suburban life may be more sustaining and representative of monuments than Mount Rushmore.

Though we might all believe we know what a suburb is, each writer’s interpretation challenges a bland interpretation, welcoming readers to the oddity of place, capturing the reader’s attention and sustaining it.

WRITING ROOTS

But there is a true and real challenge in Erdrich’s analysis of American literature…how it considers place: the problem of identity…An author needs his or her characters to have something in common with the reader. If not the land, which changes, if not a shared sense of place, what is it then that currently provides a cultural identity?

Erdrich answers this question by going back to her tribal roots, sharing stories that are part of her heritage, that she first heard in her Tewa language. At the telling of these old stories: we would be lifetime friends…Old people would nod when parts were told…It would be a new story and an old story, a personal story and a collective story, to each of us listening.

Erdrich also quotes Eudora Welty, who begs for some permanence to sustain society and thus our fiction:

It is only too easy to conceive that a bomb that could destroy all traces of places as we know them, in life and through books, and could also destroy all feelings as we know them, so irretrievably and so happily are recognition, memory, history, valor, love, all the instincts of poetry and praise, worship and endeavor, bound up in place.  Yes, so true. 

The ability to read a poem, watch a film, or see a new clip, would mean more and might stay with us, if there is recognition of PLACE –either that specific place, or in fiction, one that haunts us and brings back memories.

It happens when you are walking in your neighborhood, the sidewalk broken with weeds, the house on the corner familiar. Or you are reading something, your subconscious whispers: Here I am, though I am frightened, or repulsed or angry, or joyful, this is where I want to be.

Erdrich insists that a writer, who is beginning a story, a novel, any work of literature, must create a close study…

…of a place, its people and character, its crops, products, paranoias, dialects and failures…then we come closer to our own reality. It is difficult to impose a story and a plot on a place. But truly knowing a place provides the link between details and meaning. Location, whether it is to abandon it or draw it sharply, is where we start.

Yes, we all start in a place. We often take that place into our hearts when we move, leave our beginnings. But they stay with us. In airplanes we can escape gravity, but when we look down, we cannot escape the need to identify with some place on this earth–a place either big or small that rises up to hold us.

And when it does, we know we belong, somewhere. In a society where people travel widely, or are uprooted, either out of desire or the necessity to survive, writing can reflect a disconnect to place or a strong bond—but always a variety of complicated and emotional relationships to that place…the memory of that place.

When reading fiction, that story world will not resonate, will not hold you, if there isn’t something within the tale that you have already felt or experienced.

Erdrich states: “We can escape gravity itself, and every semblance of geography, by moving into sheer space, and yet we cannot abandon our need for reference, identity or our pull to landscapes that mirror our most intense feelings.” 

When you first begin to write, do you have visions of place—a world that can be as big as universe or as small as a single room?  Because place is where we begin.  

Doctors: Alex Pretti’s Death Reveals Militarized Immigration Raids Portend Lethal Force

A man stands to the side in Minneapolis, recording what is happening in front of him with his phone. Nearby, federal immigration agents deploy pepper spray on a female protester. The man steps forward. What began as observation becomes intervention.

Within moments, several agents move toward him and pin him to the ground. They shoot at him multiple times. Shouting follows, then chaos. He is taken to Hennepin County Medical Center, where he is pronounced dead.

This man, Alex Pretti, was a U.S. citizen, an intensive care nurse at the local Veterans Affairs hospital and a licensed gun owner. Multiple videos show the agents restraining him and removing a handgun found on him before they fire.

When 3,000 heavily weaponized federal agents — armed with assault rifles and flash-bang grenades — are deployed onto city streets, death is not an accident. It is an anticipated consequence. Minneapolis’s entire police force numbers roughly 600 officers. Flooding a civilian city with five times that number of armed agents all but ensures violent confrontation. This is not restraint. It is escalation, and civilians are the ones who pay the price.

Pretti did not die because he was reckless. He did not die because he threatened anyone. He followed the law. Pretti was restrained on the ground and disarmed — his body curled inward — when immigration agents killed him. That distinction matters.

Pretti’s death reflects what happens when firearms and law enforcement intersect in volatile public settings.

In the hours that followed, a debate began almost immediately.

That single fact became a dominant frame the administration used to interpret the event — crowding out what happened, the complexity of why it happened and what could no longer be undone.

We are physicians with different expertise. One of us, an emergency room physician, works in the trauma bay, where bodies arrive after violence has occurred. The other of us worked in quality improvement, studying how systems fail long before an ambulance is called. From those different vantage points, we see the same pattern.

In medicine, when a system predictably produces preventable deaths, we call it a sentinel event, a signal that something is structurally broken. We do not blame the last clinician involved. We investigate the system that made the outcome likely including training and protocols.

Militarized immigration enforcement should be treated the same way.

As an emergency physician, I, Halleh, experience moments like this differently. While others argue about what should or should not have happened, my mind moves downstream. I think about what happens to a body when bullets enter it. I think about anatomy, physiology and the narrow margin medicine has once gunfire is involved.

I am also trained, as a gun violence prevention advocate, to think in terms of risk. In medicine, I assess situations by probability and what reliably follows once certain conditions are in place.

Before a single shot is fired, the presence or perception of a gun reshapes how systems respond. Movements are interpreted through fear rather than fact. That shift does not depend on legality, intent or behavior — and once it occurs, individual compliance often no longer alters the trajectory.

From a clinical standpoint, this matters enormously.

People can survive being tackled. They can survive blunt force trauma. What the human body rarely survives is gunfire. Multiple gunshot wounds leave almost no opportunity for medicine to intervene. Often, even one bullet is enough.

This is not a moral judgment. It is anatomy and physiology.

As physicians, we are trained to look beyond individual tragedies and recognize patterns. Pretti’s death was not isolated. In another recent case, immigration agents fatally shot Renee Good, also a U.S. citizen, after perceiving her vehicle as a lethal threat, they stated. The circumstances differ, but the structure is the same: perceived danger, ready access to firearms and irreversible loss.

We are a country with more guns than people, where firearms are often framed as tools of protection and self-defense. For many Americans, that belief is sincere. But when immigration agents introduce guns into chaotic, emotionally charged situations, the likelihood of irreversible harm rises.

Fear does not create clarity. It narrows perception. It shortens the distance between misunderstanding and catastrophe.

I, Halleh, see the consequences of this repeatedly in the emergency department. Patients who carried a gun believing it would protect them. Patients whose fate was shaped long before force was ever used. By the time they reach us, the conditions that determined what happened are already in place.

Today’s immigration agents are uniquely positioned for escalation. Their mission prioritizes enforcement and detention, not crowd de-escalation in volatile public settings. They operate in politically charged environments where peaceful protests can be misread as threats. In situations like these, the combination of fear, authority and excess weaponry makes lethal results more likely.

From a public health perspective, this is not a question of individual intent. It is a question of institutional design.

What worries me now is the fatigue I see among my colleagues. It is not indifference, but exhaustion. I worry, too, that the nation is overwhelmed by the images coming out of Minnesota, choosing to turn away from the brutality flooding our screens.

Emergency medicine already demands enormous emotional investment. There is only so much preventable harm a person can witness before their self-preservation necessitates turning away. But the consequences do not end. They arrive by ambulance. They arrive with families who were not prepared to say goodbye that morning.

We do not expect every physician to become an advocate. We do not expect universal agreement on firearm policy. But we worry about what happens when those of us who see the aftermath most clearly feel pressure to stay silent. Silence widens the distance between decision and consequence.

In the emergency department, cause and effect are not abstract. There is no rewind. Just a body, a resuscitation room and the knowledge that Pretti did not survive.

MY Heartfelt Thanks to Chicago Tribune Opinion  Authors:   Jennifer Obel and Halleh Akbarnia

SOME BRIGHT NOWHERE A Novel by Ann Packer

I’ve read all of Ann Packer’s novels….she being one of those writers that feels like a friend, someone you could sit down with after reading the last page and say, “Wow, love this….but why did you wait to have your character… what made you decide to…

And SOME BRIGHT NOWHERE is that kind of novel. Thus, I have so many questions.

Why did Packer decide to present this recent novel this way: 

Plot: When his wife Claire develops cancer, Eliot becomes her devoted caregiver. But as her death nears, Claire makes a surprising request that challenges Elliot and their relationship: Claire says: “I’d like them to be here with me.”
“Them?”
“Holly and Michelle. …. What I mean is, I’d like them to take care of me.”
“OK.” Eliot hesitated. “The more the merrier?”
“Eliot. Instead of you.”   WOW!

Themes:  It is interesting that the name of Packer’s MC is Claire, as often throughout the novel, you feel that Claire has been the exact opposite, that she has something major to say, to feel…but things are not clear, there is haze and fog in the way. And yes, it rains a lot.

The book examines the “profound gifts and costs of truly loving someone,” the nature of marriage, and the difficult decisions surrounding end-of-life care. 

MY REACTIONS 

I did keep reading. All the way to the end. And there is fulfillment to these odd choices. There is reason in the writing. But did I love or enjoy the painful middle? No.

Most of us have friends that are women; my male readers have friends that are women. 

As a former RN, the gender of a caregiver is rarely the reason a patient survives or does well, or is even ecstatic.

My pregnancies occurred during the gradual change from male to female obstetricians. And when I worked as an RN at a major Chicago hospital in the Labor and Delivery…many of the OB’s were male. Did it make a difference to me as an RN? No. And after years of caring for pregnant women, these men would gradually lose their patients despite the fact that they were not only  excellent in their skills and all aspects of medicine, but also in their relationships with their patients. Sadly, there are few men entering the obstetric field today. 

But in this novel, after a cancer diagnosis, Claire only wants her women friends to care for her. Was this hard on Eliot? Yes!

THAT’S the basic story behind the novel…how long will Claire continue to push Eliot away; how will he deal with this painful decision. His wife is dying and he cannot be with her? What has he done to cause this? How can he make things better? And what do their children think about their mother’s decision? 

Even Clair has moments of uncertainty, fueled by the thought that won’t go away: these are her last days and moments.  

Packer provides a poem to stress where Clair is…

I you have read the novel or if you now do or don’t want to read it, let me know your thoughts, and always, thanks for reading. 

Our Love Affair With Photos

This post first appeared in the Huffington Post in a slightly different form 

Photos of the meal you’re eating, the dress you’re buying, a car crash on your street, the rash developing on your face — all examples of photos that will be deleted from your phone after they have served their purpose. Or not…recently a photo of a woman being shot at, a woman actually being murdered in Minneapolis, has once again changed the way we think about or use our phones. It’s a new development in our society. But is it always a good thing?

A Book About Facebook Photos and More  

In his book, Terms of Service, Jacob Silverman, often referred to as a “thoughtful critic of our evolving digital lifestyles,” points out the negatives (excuse the pun) in our picture-snapping culture.

“Photos become less about memorializing a moment than communicating the reality of that moment to others.”

He develops this idea, claiming that often the purpose of the picture is not to capture the moment (as the photo above in Minneapolis did) but to express the personal anxiety we may feel about our modern lives.

Are others doing things more interesting, more fulfilling than we are?

Because THE PHOTO has truly entered into some timeless competition. Silverman claims, and I think he is right, that some party goers forget about experiencing fun in the hopes their photo on Facebook will instead announce: “YES, LOOK AT ME AND MY LIFE, I AM HAVING FUN.”

But besides the ability to possibly aid in convicting the perpetrator of a crime, we more often use our phones to create a CONTINUING STORY of our exciting lives. 

It is interesting that in our current culture we feel the need not only to send photos of all that we do, what we eat, where we go, what we buy and who we are with — but to often go somewhere and practice mindfulness by listening to our breathing, so we can learn to live in the moment. Really? 

So which is it? MINDFULNESS: living in the moment? How ironic. Do we even know what a moment is? To find an answer, let’s take a step back. 

A BRIEF HISTORY of the  PHOTO

How did we exist before the constant need to capture an action or some object in time and shout it to the world? There was the mind, then the thought. Yes, just the thought!  Now let’s try to sort it out this way:

1. The purpose of a photo was to PRESERVE a human’s image so we would know that person, remember them. Previously, those with wealth sat for a portrait to be painted by either a really good artist or an itinerant one — thus  the job got done, and we know what Elizabeth the First of England supposedly looked like, as well as George Washington etc. You get the picture! 

2. Later, the purpose of a photo became its ability to record history. Yes, there are paintings of battles, coronations, but they took months. Photographs were immediate, allowed for a variety of views. We had Mathew B. Brady (May 18, 1822 – January 15, 1896) a photo-journalist and one of the first American photographers, whose name became synonymous with photos of the Civil War.

3. And as the decades progressed, the daguerreotype and the tintype gave way to a process where a dry gel on paper, film, replaced the photographic plate. Then the photographer could take photos without the clumsy boxes of plates and the toxic chemical previously needed.

Then, film was developed by George Eastman, of Rochester, New York. As early as 1888, Eastman’s Kodak camera was available to consumers. His slogan: “You press the button, we do the rest.” By 1901 the public could take photos using the famous Kodak Brownie, a great little camera that took pretty decent photos.

4. And that was truly the beginning — you didn’t need to hire someone to paint your portrait. Families framed photographs and hung them in their homes honoring grandparents, remembering weddings and births, helping the aching heart that missed those who were miles away. In some cultures, people took photos of their loved ones lying in coffins surrounded by flowers. But it was all about remembering. It was all about preserving and honoring the moment. 

AN ADVERTISEMENT, A TALISMAN OF MEMORY —MINDFULNESS ANYONE? 

In some ways, one could say that a GI having a photo of his sweetheart during World War II, or glancing at a photo taped to the  flight deck while a pilot during conflict, contributed to mindfulness. The photo carried you away from the trauma and for brief moments you could be present to the person you loved. Photos were and for many are still a talisman of memory. Photos ignite thought.

But now there’s a plethora. Taking photos of things that are truly worthy of remembering, and combining that with things you might forget in 15 minutes — has changed our attitudes toward the photos themselves.

We take a photo…we delete. We worry about how we look, so we take and retake to get it right…we probably always had that worry, but film was costly and you didn’t SEE the photo until after it was developed. Photo phones changed that whole process, and truly changed what picture-taking meant in the moment. Because it’s not always a moment — it’s a photo saved or deleted in the moment until the right one, the photo you can PICTURE…comes along.

THE POLAROID or LET’S GET NAKED

Let’s not forget the Polaroid! It saved folks from the following scenario: you take your roll of film to the drugstore to be developed and when you return for it, you have to meet with a manager and maybe a policeman. (This happened to a friend of mine as recently as the 90’s. She took some photos of her children naked in the bathtub and too much anatomy was showing.)

But the Polaroid allowed people to take these photos — because they developed right there in your home. Now the concept of privacy isn’t even on anyone’s radar, and thus some young people have been labeled sex offenders because they were not aware of the dangers of clicking and sharing without thinking first. Those images could hardly fit into some nostalgia category or talisman of memory…Again — change, change, change.

So What of My Photo History?

My husband and I take photos, because we love our families, want to remember our life with them. 

Photos of family should be protected and treasured, and I don’t think everyone needs to see them. I also don’t believe that we are that protected online. Silverman would probably agree with me. The jacket copy on his book reads: Social networking is a staple of modern life, but its continued evolution is becoming increasingly detrimental to our lives. Shifts in communication, identity, and privacy are affecting us more than we realize or understand… (consider) the identity-validating pleasures and perils of online visibility; also…our newly adopted view of daily life through the lens of what’s share-worthy; and the…(ability of ) social media platforms — Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more — to mine our personal data for advertising revenue…(invading our privacy)

In his recent address to the graduating class of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, Ken Burns took the opportunity to reflect on past history while stressing the major points in his talk–fight to keep history from repeating itself and fight to change human nature for the better. While doing so, he took a swipe at Facebook and social media.

Do not allow our social media to segregate us into ever smaller tribes and clans, fiercely and sometimes appropriately loyal to our group, but also capable of metastasizing into profound distrust of the other…

He makes a very valid point. Possibly it’s time to reconsider what each photo means and how to use it, honor it. The fact of instant photos can be helpful…but also can be damaging. Maybe we need to think as we use this technology.

What do your photos mean to you? As a dear friend of mine once told me in her practical and knowing way: if your house catches on fire, grab your photos albums. Everything else can be replaced.

Well people, I guess you better take your phones!

Mama, Did He Take a Bus?

My brother Bill Pfordresher died this week, after a brave struggle with a disease that gradually affects one’s memory and motor function…a truly cruel disease. But I’m writing, not to focus on endings, but to write about Bill’s life, how awesome he always was…and from the very beginning. 

We were a family of five…until my father died of a massive coronary at the age of 45, leaving my mother Jinni with a six, three and three-month old, Bill. And though this was truly part of his very early life, Bill gradually learned about fathers, and thus began to ask why he didn’t have one…later, hearing more family conversations, asking if he did have a father, had he gone to heaven? Certainly, Bill was hearing those words in our home, and being wise for his age, only three or four, he was trying to figure things out.

So one day (our mother said she was ironing in the kitchen) Bill came in with a question: “Mama, did he take a bus?”  

In our family, the story is legend, because our wise and amazing mother Jinni, knew exactly what Bill was asking. She also knew the importance of truth…that it is linked to trust. And that very day, Jinni did what she had done with John, who was six when our father died, and later with me who had been only three…she drove Bill to the cemetery, doing her best to explain heaven, death, sorrow and love…loving attempts to help a child understand where his father had gone.  

REUNIONS  

And now it is only days since Bill died and left us…the youngest of the three, life unpredictable, life always a pattern of sorrow and joy. Surely Jinni our mother, and Al our father….were there to great him. Surely, Bill no longer has questions, his body free of the weight of illness…his new life one of peace and understanding. 

Bill did not take a bus…but after enduring illness and death…he is now free to live beyond human bonds. We miss him, cry for him. He taught us how to love, to have faith, to sing when you are sad, to always look for joy and happiness. 

Bill was a gift of joy to Rita, his wife, to me, my brother John, my mother and so many others. Now he will be with both of his parents and many friends who went before him. I like to think there are guitars in heaven, Bill will once again finding freedom and joy as his fingers create new and heavenly music. 

PS This post is only normal in length…it being impossible to include all aspects of Bill’s amazing and wonderful life.