I Was Here Once:

Forging Connections Through Place-Based Writing

Where we live matters. As sure as we alter a place which we inhabit, those places leave their thumbprints on us. I was born in the suburbs of Chicago, lived in the city for a while, but have called Madison, Wisconsin, home for the last 22 years. Both my children were born and raised in Madison. My daughter now lives in New York City, where she is attending college, and she has remarked that she has never felt more like a native Wisconsinite than while living in New York.

Earlier this summer I visited my daughter and spent three days inhabiting the spaces she now calls home (as she still does Madison– she is currently of two homes, apparently). One night we walked around her neighborhood in Brooklyn, looking at the bars and bodegas, the graffiti on the walls, the posters for bands and art openings and missing people. We came across a softball diamond glowing in the night, two teams battling it out in a version of the game that was both similar to and different from what I play in Wisconsin.

It was cool seeing my daughter’s current world, the new spaces she inhabits. But there was a slight echo to our explorations, something that felt familiar, and after a while I put my thumb on it. I had read about this place, about this Brooklyn neighborhood, earlier in the year in one of my ninth grade English classes. A student had written a poem about Brooklyn, his hometown, the place he lived for 13 years before moving to Madison, Wisconsin, due to his parents’ jobs and his mother’s desire to be closer to her own mother. It was this poem that was resurfacing in my memory during me and my daughter’s night in Brooklyn.

The student, I’ll call him Eli, was shy and, as a student new to the district, clearly without close friends or acquaintances in the class. One of our first units had my students consider and then write about the places that matter to them. Our work was inspired by David Blair’s terrific poem “Detroit (While I Was Away)”, in which the poet shares a complex love letter to his adopted hometown. The students picked through Blair’s poem, analyzed songs about place, created maps of places that mattered to them, and wrote descriptively about their own significant places in whatever form they felt to be right for them.

Eli chose to write a poem about the Brooklyn neighborhood in which he grew up. It was a long poem, and while he was composing it, he wouldn’t let me see it. It was only until it was turned in that I got to read it. It was remarkable, one of the best poems ever written by a student of mine, much less a ninth grader, and it brought alive to me the vibrancy, the beauty, and the despair of Eli’s neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was this work that made me and my daughter’s Brooklyn explorations feel so familiar.

The next day as my daughter and I stood in line to get into the American Museum of Natural History, I was able to access the poem on the Google Classroom app on my phone. I read it aloud to my daughter. I was wrong about their neighborhoods being the same: my daughter lives in Bushwick; Eli’s was the adjacent Park Slope neighborhood. But much of what I read still felt very familiar to the world my daughter now inhabits. Beyond the details of the neighborhood in the poem, Eli’s aching sense of longing for this place that mattered to him was palpable. So much so that both my daughter and I were both a little choked up after I was done reading it.

It is my hope that writing this love letter to the place he missed provided Eli some degree of catharsis, as it did for David Blair when he was away from his beloved Detroit. If nothing else, it provided Eli some tangible connections to his new world in Madison. Eli, after some gentle nudging, submitted the poem to our school’s literary magazine, where it was published alongside the work of his classmates. More remarkably, the act of writing about places that mattered revealed that Eli was not the only native Brooklynite in the class. A girl, I’ll call her Maria, had also just moved to Madison from New York City, and they both wrote about their former worlds 950 miles away. Although they had previously not even spoken with each other, as far as I can tell, for the rest of year they sat together at the same table in my classroom, two displaced New Yorkers, making new memories and connections in this place, no longer quite so alone.

• Click here for an overview of the place-based writing unit.
• Click here to read “This Is Ninth Street,” Eli’s poem about Brooklyn.