This August marks my four-year anniversary with Chicago. It was my first time living outside of my hometown of Chico let alone outside of California. Chico is a college town, and I had gone to college in this college town. I was on the verge of becoming a townie. I frequented the townie bar to drink with members of the community theatre scene, the music scene, and Chico’s burgeoning comedy scene. I didn’t think of these people as townies though. They were just people who lived there.
Like many young writers, I had the idea to write a book of interconnected stories about my hometown and its people, my own Dubliners or Lost in the City. I’d call it, I don’t know, The Avenues after the series of parallel streets intersecting the Esplanade. Each story would be like each row of homes like broken teeth hidden under a canopy of oak.
My final semester at Chico State, I wrote two of the stories that I envisioned would be part of the collection, but I didn’t get any further than that. In some dark and forgotten corner of my Google Drive, there exists a folder of false starts, scenes that didn’t make it past 250 words.
But even with the stories that I completed, there was something hollow about them. This is partly because I just wasn’t as good of a writer five, six years ago. I wasn’t as disciplined, I hadn’t read as widely, I hadn’t written as much, I hadn’t discovered my own process. I’m simply a better writer than I was when I tried to write that book.
More importantly, I couldn’t write about my hometown, because I didn’t understand it. The eccentricities of the people and the environment did not present themselves to me until I had something to compare it to. My family didn’t travel much and when we did, we stayed within California’s borders. I had yet to see Chico from a distance. Only when I was able to step 2,000 miles and several years away from it, did the image of it reconstitute itself into what it truly is. I didn’t appreciate the Sierra Nevada forming the horizon until I drove along I-65 through Indiana where the only thing to look at are the windmills. I couldn’t see the geological history carved into the fractured earth until I had spent months encased in a concrete jungle. Even the messiness of Chico’s map didn’t become apparent until I moved from point to point along Chicago’s grid, where everything is a square.
The Avenues has been thoroughly abandoned as a project; I hadn’t thought about it until I began writing this. I haven’t given up on writing about Chico. Before, it was the only place I had spent a significant amount of time in, so it wasn’t a unique place. It was just a town. I realize now that those two stories could have been set anywhere because my characters just lived there. The setting didn’t affect them. Now, for better or worse, it’s home.
Wiki Lit 