What I’m reading: Maine and Vermont edition

Melody WarnickBuy local, Reading and writing

I have historically been more of a book borrower than a book buyer, but in light of the fact that I want EVERYONE I KNOW to buy my book, in hardback, at MSRP, when it comes out, I’m trying to mend my ways. Plus, books make amazing souvenirs. Here’s what made it into my book bag on a trip to New England.

Books that I bought in Maine and Vermont

 

  1. Three magazines about Maine from the amazing Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine: Down East, Eat Maine, and Zest Maine. Would it maybe surprise you to know that I’m writing about food in Maine right now?
  2. Mud Season, by Ellen Stimson. About a woman who moves her family to a farm in Vermont and … rues the day? Stay tuned.
  3. Delancey, the wonderful memoir about starting a restaurant by Molly Wizenberg of Orangette. I’ve already read this one, but it was in Longfellow’s free pile of advanced reader copies. (Why do they give books away free in a bookstore? BECAUSE THEY LOVE US.) I’m happy to have an actual paper copy to highlight and wreck.
  4. Lynne Martin’s Home Sweet Anywhere, about an older couple who sells their house and travels around the world for a year. I think I’m just a sucker for any book with the word “home” in the title.
  5. Nick Hornby’s More Baths, Less Talking, a collection of his columns about books and reading from The Believer. When I say LOL, I very rarely mean it, but this—this deserves all the LOLs it gets. I love Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, but there’s something refreshing about a guy who admits he hates poetry and most classic literature and sometimes would rather watch TV sports. I’m a convert.

In case you’d missed the themes, it appears I’m gravitating toward books about finding home, leaving home, making great places, eating in said great places, writing, and, um, baths. If you want to follow along, friend me on Goodreads.

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Are people who move more creative?

Melody WarnickMoving

Some amazing writers have been on the receiving end of a MacArthur Genius Grant: George Saunders, Sandra Cisneros, Karen Russell. (I’m still waiting for my own phone call.) Today, the MacArthur Foundation released a report explaining that among the 897 innovators and creatives to receive its $625,000 no-strings-attached grant are an exceptionally high number of movers.

On average, 30 percent of Americans (and 42 percent of the college-educated folks) live outside the state where they were born. But for the MacArthur Fellows born in the United States, that number skyrockets to 79 percent. Which leads me to wonder: Do creative people move more often? Or does moving make you more creative?

Maybe a bit of both. Creatives tend to congregate in urban centers (an enormous amount were living in California when they got their award) because they’re attracted to cool, zeitgeisty places with a lot of diversity, culture, openness, and art supply stores. The more creatives who are there, the more come. Plus, even geniuses have to make money, and big cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles offer more job opportunities.

Where MacArthur Geniuses Live

But it’s not inconceivable that being highly mobile is one of the things that makes creative geniuses creative geniuses. According to research by social psychologists Adam Galinsky and William Maddux, living abroad increases creativity, perhaps because it exposes people to the kind of dynamic situations and novel ways of life that produce new ideas.

Sure, Paris would be nice, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t get the same benefit moving from Utah to Iowa to Texas to Virginia (ahem). At least there’s this assurance from the MacArthur Foundation:

We strongly believe that creativity exists everywhere, and one of our continuing goals will be to recognize and inspire others to embrace that creativity, in all of its many manifestations, both inside and outside traditional, expected locations.

Translation: Creatives in Idaho, North Dakota, Nebraska, and West Virginia–the only states ignored by the MacArthur Foundation so far–should be waiting for their phone call.

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The problem of residential FOMO

Melody WarnickGreat towns

While the Internet crawls with rankings of big cities, apparently fewer of us care about smallish towns. But the New York Times has got your back. In an August 21, 2014, Op-Talk piece, they reprint small-town rankings from Conde Nast Traveler, Fodor’s, Livability.com, Nerdwallet, Family Circle, and Smithsonian, with these conclusions:

Indiana is surprisingly livable!

The Golden State, predictably, cleaned up.

New Mexico: just as nice for tourists as it is for locals.

Don’t give up on the Rust Belt just yet.

Thinking of building a highly livable small town? Consider naming it some variation of “Carmel”!

A few towns show up across multiple lists: Cooperstown, New York; Beaufort, South Carolina; and Woodbury, Minnesota among them. (Meanwhile, none of the great towns I’ve lived in even earned a mention.) Now I’m seriously fighting FOMO here. And the desire to look up real estate listings in Woodbury, Minnesota.

Woodbury house

Just kidding, I couldn’t resist. It’s only $949,000! When I win the lottery, I may come calling, Woodbury.

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Stuff I love: Geography art

Melody WarnickStuff I love

Right before we moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, my husband gave me a little piece of Virginia to put on my wall:

Typographic Virginia

Typography is big in our house, so I was a sucker for this CAPow print (a scant $18 at Society 6), with its hand-drawn lettering spelling out the names of Virginia’s 95 counties. Now framed and hanging in the living room of our house, smack-dab between our two front windows, it’s kind of crying out for some friends, right? If I start building a collection of Virginia prints, this one, from Etsy seller Painted Post, could very well be next.

 

Landmark State Print

 

Seen any state-related artwork I can’t/shouldn’t live without?

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10,000 hours

Melody WarnickPlace love

CC photo via Flickr by Marianne Bevis

CC photo via Flickr by Marianne Bevis

Tell people you’re moving to Austin, Texas, and they get misty-eyed. They squee. They clap you on the shoulders and tell you how lucky you are, how great Austin is, how much you’ll adore it just the way they adored it when they went to school there/vacationed there/caught a SXSW show there. You eventually come to agree with their assessment: Moving to Austin makes us the luckiest family on earth.

Or at least that’s what happened to us when my husband took a job in Austin in 2010. Never had a place been so well-hyped. And yet even after we’d been there for a few months and had personally sampled some of the wonders (Torchy’s fried avocado tacos, Alamo Drafthouse movies) that people described to us in electrifying detail, Austin wasn’t clicking for us. We felt weird about it, knowing the feverish devotion the city inspired. I remember having dinner with my fried Amber, hearing her rave about Austin and how she never wanted to leave, and thinking, “Huh.”

The adorable Anne at Modern Mrs. Darcy describes staying with some friends who bought a second home in Chicago because they wanted to spend more time there. “Chicago is a great city,” she says, “but there are other great cities. Why Chicago?” Here’s her aha moment:

I’m starting to suspect that to really love a place, you’ve got to meet it halfway: you have to choose to make it yours.

Let’s say you like a place. Because you like it, you choose to spend a little more time there. And the more time you put in, the more you like it. It’s a virtuous cycle. It’s how you fall in love.

Call this the 10,000 hours theory: When you want to become a fabulous tennis player or pen twirler or Twitter comedian, you spend a lot of time practicing and perfecting and just being with that activity until you’re great at it. But you probably don’t start down that road unless you have a baseline of affection for the thing you want to be good at.

Falling in love with your town is like that. You chose that town because you like it, at least a little bit. It may not be full-blown love, but you see some possibilities. You and your town could be really good together. That’s enough to make you start putting in the time, showing up, and suffering through periodic potholes, property tax increases, and storms of the century. All that time, effort, and affection make you the master of where you live. Eventually you become the veritable Serena Williams of Lancaster, or Des Moines, or Sheboygan, or wherever. But to get to that point, you have to put in the time—and you have to want to.

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