Alan Briggs - Staying Is the New Going: Choosing to Love Where God Places You

T HERE WAS A TIME when American readers seemed enamored of novelists for whom the world was their oyster writers who traveled widely, who crossed frontiers and opened their eyes to worlds readers had never dreamed of. They couldnt get enough of the novels of Jack London or Ernest Hemingway. They thrilled to the exotic stories of Joseph Conrad and James A. Michener. These writers and many like them created the myth that we must leave home and travel far and wide to experience the world and to find our lifes work. They infected their readers with wanderlust. They invite us to disregard the mundane and to see home as a launching pad, never a destination.

But we oughtnt forget the marvelous American literary tradition of the distinctly provincial writer. These novelists and poets wrote out of their deep and abiding connection to their place. Many of them never left their home. All of them were profoundly shaped by the topography of their locale, its seasons, its residents, and its sense of place. Its the kind of regional writing you encounter in Thoreau and Emerson and Twain (although he also traveled widely).

You can start to understand the richness of provincial writing when you read the gorgeous poetry of Emily Dickinson and realize that there could have been no Emily Dickinson without the town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Indeed, Dickinson spent most of the last decade of her life confined to her Amherst house, producing exquisite work that wouldnt be read until after her death.

Likewise, the modernist poet William Carlos Williams was born and raised in Rutherford, New Jersey, in the same house he would move his wife into and in which he would raise his own family. It was from this house he practiced as a local doctor, making house calls to the good folk of Rutherford. It was in this very same house that he spent forty years of his spare time writing the beautifully accessible poems that would later inspire Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets in the 1950s and 60s.

For Flannery OConnor it was the small town of Milledgeville, Georgia. For Walker Percy, Covington, Louisiana. And would the poems of Robert Frost be the same without the shaping influence that rural New Hampshire had on him?

In this same vein, contemporary poet Wendell Berry, a native resident and farmer of Henry County, Kentucky, says, What I stand for is what I stand on. Thats something Hemingway could never have said.

Why am I telling you about Americas famous provincialist writers? Because it seems to me that when it comes to Christian writing we can be enamored of the missionary adventure literature of David Livingstone or Hudson Taylor or Jim Eliot