This is Overlooks and Understories
A little note about this newsletter
Places aren’t always what they seem.
At first glance, both overlooks and understories are landscape features: a view from above; a forest’s undergrowth.
But both words also have double meanings: to overlook is to fail to notice something; an understory is the often invisible subtext roiling beneath the surface of what we thought we knew.
This newsletter is devoted to deepening our understandings of both senses of these words: the overt and hidden meanings of the places we might think we understand, and the surprising, even haunting stories that explain why.
To do this, I want to bring places with hidden histories to life, histories that have bearing on the immense problems of our world today and how we might meet them together. I want to evoke the sensory detail that transports you to a place to inhabit it as if you yourself were there, and I want you to feel and understand why a place may not be what it seems at first. Sometimes this requires acknowledging the at times disturbing histories of power and violence that made a place what it is today. At other times, this requires nodding to the surprising and often quiet ways that people survived and even thrived against the odds.
Evoking not only the haunting details of place but why they matter to us requires being omnivorous in storytelling strategies. Each week I’ll take us to a new place and try to bring it to life in ways that academic writing often fails to do. Novelists and creative nonfiction writers, for example, have at their disposal the powerful tools of character, plot, setting, and pacing to transport readers into a fabricated world on the page where we get lost in story and cannot help but care deeply about what happens next—both to a place and to the characters who inhabit it. We are gripped and compelled to keep reading. So, too, I hope, it is with this newsletter.
Stay tuned for the first dispatch coming soon. And subscribe!