R.J. Keller suggested it was the Moxie. (The soda indigenous to Maine, not the wonderful word the pop inspired that means vigor, verve, pep, courage and aggressiveness.)

I was going to order a case, but Alexander Chee provided an interesting explanation in his essay, Annie Dillard and the Writing Life:

From the things Annie circled in my drafts, it was clear one answer to my problem really was, in a sense, Maine. From my mom’s family, I’d gotten the gift for the telling detail—Your Uncle Charles is so cheap he wouldn’t buy himself two hamburgers if he was hungry—but also a voice cluttered by the passive voice in common use in that of that part of the world—I was writing to ask if you were interested—a way of speaking that blunted all aggression, all direct inquiry, and certainly, all description. The degraded syntax of the Scottish settlers forced to Maine by their British lords, using indirect speech as they went and then after they stayed.

My favorite Maine writers write differently from all my other favorite writers—very differently. They are exceptional at telling details. They all tend to tell a story that will later be the detail for something else. They are all verbose. And while they don’t clutter their writing with passive voice, they do tend to flit back and forth in time when describing something or someone. They tend to put a thing in context of its history.

Those are generalizations, of course, so they are not true of every Maine writer. I’ve never been to Maine, so I couldn’t even begin to guess why Maine writers seem to be a particular set as opposed to American writers. (Maybe they just describe things by a story and in context of time in their everyday storytelling and conversation?) I don’t know.

I sometimes think of the U.S. as one culture, but it’s not. It’s not even the same culture in Southern Ohio as it is in Northern Ohio. I know generalizations are dangerous when they become stereotypes, but I miss Social Studies. I loved learning about and understanding other cultures, and there really is no other way to do that than to generalize. I hope that the understanding generalizations provide can help overcome the prejudice that stereotypes inspire, but who knows? I suppose people smarter than I have done studies on it, which is why you don’t see as many Social Studies classes anymore.

On a more useful-to-you note, Chee goes on to quote this explanation of telling vs. showing from Annie Dillard:

“If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel.”

The essay has lots of gems in it, and well worth a read.

On a related note, John Irving’s latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River, will be released on October 27. I can’t wait!

Have you found a region/culture/state whose writers particularly appeal to you?

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© Natasha Fondren for Natasha Fondren, 2009. | 15 comments

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