Fragments From Floyd

"How did you start thinking about 'place", and why did you start writing (or blogging) about it?"

One year ago on June 15, an energetic and eclectic group of bloggers, LiveJournalers and other web writers united to turn our words to the topic above--the first of what has come to be the "biweekly" opportunity to write about place. The online site bears the dysphonic but appropriate name from the field of ecology-- Ecotone: "a place where two natural communities meet and in which there is greater diversity than in either of the component habitats by itself".

Here is a list of the biweeklies to date, responses all totalled including several hundred essays, rants, lamentations, expositions and narratives somehow, loosely or tightly bound to place.

I think back over the names of people I've come to know as friends through the Ecotone in this year. It includes many of the place bloggers at Ecotone and also many readers--bloggers and non-bloggers alike--who have found Fragments via Ecotone postings or blogrolls of Ecotone writers. I'm not sure any of us could put our fingers accurately on what it is that binds us together loosely as a community of writers and readers. Maybe, in another year, we'll better understand our connectedness to place and to each other. I can say, there is something here that warrants digging deeper.

I tried to express my own motives and hopes a year ago by using the analogies of maps and lenses. I didn't say it very well but I still think I agree in principle with what I wrote in response to the very first Ecotone biweekly topic. My map is dotted now with pins marking the places of writers in the northeast, the middle-west, the southeast, the Left Coast and across the world--so many places I could travel to now and feel like "I've already been here because I read what he says about the countryside, where she goes with her camera, how they come back from their local haunts with word pictures from those mountains, towns or fields." And I gather many of you feel in some small way the same about Goose Creek and the Blue Ridge.

I'd like to think there is much more to say and many more writers to become involved in the Ecotone its offspring someday. It has become a resource for more than a few. The Ecotone writings have found a role in the dissertation topic described at Tim Lindgren's Where Project--an "experiment in place-based blogging." Who knows what other things are working behind the scenes.

And so ends the first year of Ecotone. Thanks especially to Numenius and Pica at Feathers of Hope for setting up and administering the wiki that houses the site. I look forward to getting to know more writers about place in the coming year; and there at one point, there was even some talk of a gathering some day for a face-to-face place-writer's weekend. Hmmmm.