Open House

by Mark Doty (Editor)

Twenty Writers Define Home In All of Its Complexity and Variety

"Where do I live? I don’t have a ready answer, not really, but I’ve realized there’s something I like about not having an answer. And indeed something of that spirit—a curious, open engagement with the now, in its slippery and uncertain character—animates this book."
—Mark Doty, from his Introduction

In a shifting world, concepts of place and home take many forms. Mark Doty gathers an impressive group of writers to describe their contemporary sense of home. Victoria Redel lives her teenage years from inside a fifteen-pound body cast—loving and hating the loss of her body; Barbara Hurd finds that within a cave, the absence of all light allows for clarity of vision; and Andrea Barrett wipes filth from a sill in her Brooklyn apartment only to realize that the dirt is actually “ash of buildings, ash of planes. Ash of people.” Surroundings—walls, trees, or states of mind—are defined by our reactions to them. These essays are about how the mind can create a home—for a moment, or for a lifetime.

Contributors include Bernard Cooper, Carol Muske-Dukes, Deborah Lott, Elizabeth McCracken, Mary Morris, and Terry Tempest Williams.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2003

About the author

Mark Doty is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Deep Lane and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award. He lives in New York, New York.

Reviews

[Dee · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Faced with an airplane conversation and the inevitable 'Where are you from?' I am nonplussed. I realize the questioner doesn't want the whole elaborate story; it's just a polite inquiry. But how on earth do I answer it truthfully, without beginning a far more involved narrative than anybody wants to hear? Although of course it isn't the listener I'm really worried about; my anxiety has more to do with the fact that I don't have an answer for myself." - p. xiii-xiv

"Fifty years ago, driving across America would have meant a meandering passage through regions clearly demarcated by evidences of particularity: regional architectures, locution and cadences and patterns of speech, cuisines, sartorial preferences, ways of viewing the world. The cloverleafs and arterial passageways of the interstate highway system changed all that, just as the advent of television has. Just the triumph of the franchise, that arm of global capitalism has." -p. xiv

"This marked the beginning of a feeling I had that books could raise me, could help me create a self, could become my parents, my advisors--objects that took the place of the people whom I might have looked to for advice, information, solace, but who were unavailable to me." - p.194

[Elizabeth]

Hard to choose stars with such a variety of contributors. Mostly serious.

[Mary Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some really great essays about what 'home' means to writers.

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

wonderful inside peek at writers' inspirations and habits