Dear departed: Writing the lifeworlds of place

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the lifeworlds of place, and the significant part that the storied word might play in them. It considers the modern disciplinary history of place study, and styles of creative geographical writing presently being employed to configure place as a lived phenomenon, with a past, present and future. Across the piece, an experiment in place‐portraiture unfolds, according to a series of episodes penned in non‐fiction prose. The muse for these meditations is an arresting site reserved for burying the remains of loved ones: a seaside pet cemetery. Deep diving into the cemetery's place lore, and the life of its custodian, “The Keeper,” the essay explores the loss, love and longing felt for domestic companion animals by grieving humans, the better to understand a nexus of geographies; variously, of memory, emotion, intimacy, responsibility and creativity. The essay closes by reflecting on how a sustained fusion of site, subject and style can give voice to a language of radical parochialism and, simultaneously, reset the wider representational project by which geographers engage proprietary feelings about place, its presumed fate and possible prospects. In its avoidance of a more conventional academic mode, and adoption of descriptive geographical narratives, the paper offers an alternate literary model by which pressing environmental challenges might yet be affectively articulated and addressed.

Animal geographies II: Killing and caring (in times of crisis)

“…Research examines how care is enacted. Lorimer (2019) considers the pet cemetery as a place that demonstrates loss, love and longing by pet owners, and also care by the ground keeper and the town community. This is a ‘minor place’ imperilled by development, which provides a nexus of ‘memory, emotion, intimacy, responsibility and creativity’ (2019: 333).…”

A virtual island journey: place and place writing in lockdown

“…8 Recent critical-creative work in cultural geography by Caitlin DeSilvey, John Wylie, Hayden Lorimer and Tim Cresswell has shared this interest in the writingled, impressionistic encounter with small places. 9 Both vertical travel and microspection are central to place writing, even if they are not named as such in the writing itself. Bunting's The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre is typical in centring on a small, unremarkable, revisited plot of land of great import to the author -in her case, the spot in the Hambleton Hills on the western edge of the North York Moors on which her father built a private chapel.…”

All‐world aging: A gero of all things under the material press in time

“…Recent empirical interests and applications have been extensive—from emotional journeying through time (McQuoid and Dijst 2012) to historical constructions, meanings, and uses of time (Glennie and Thrift 2009) and numerous topics besides, time has proved directly insightful to research across a number of fields (Ellegård 1999, 2019; Neutens et al 2011). Beyond this work, time has also been quietly influential in the discipline as it is embedded in research interested in paths and experiences of creation and accumulation and/or in the connections between pasts, presents, and futures (e.g., Barnett 2006; Castree 2009; Steen 2016; Lorimer 2019).…”