This month, I’m writing words and posting images relating to the landscape of memory. I hope to write poems most days and also share photos, quotes, and more prosaic thoughts related in some way to memory, nostalgia, longing for place, remembering and forgetting, landscape, dreamscape, landscape’s memory and memory’s landscape, the intersection of the layered historical physical world with personal memory, the frames that both landscape and memory use to contain and order our focus, the landscape of childhood, the landscape of devastation, how memories lie and tell the truth, the fragmentation of memory, how landscapes shape us and our memories, and so on. All the posts will be linked to the Introductory Page as they are posted. Thanks for visiting.

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Today, I’m just going to post a few landscapes from my childhood; these are places I spent a lot of time, mostly alone, mostly brimming with strong emotion, between about age 12 and age 17. It’s interesting to me that most of the photos don’t correspond to the images of these places in my memory. If the first two weren’t labelled, I wouldn’t have known where or when they were.

These were taken (by me) at the lake where we had a cottage from about 1973 or 1974 until around 1980:

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“I am made of pieces and of the spaces between them where other pieces used to be. I am a landscape of loss. Most of me is the memory of where else, and who else, and with whom, I have been and no longer am.” — Mark Tredinnick, from “Prologue,” The Blue Plateau: An Australian Pastoral (2009)