Thin Places
By Kristin Hacken South | January 22, 2024 |
Therese here. Please join me in welcoming Kristin South as an official WU contributor! Kristin was our most recent UnConference scholarship winner and quickly became woven into the fabric of our last in-person event, making meaningful connections with others and sharing her experience with clarity and generosity. She contributed a guest post here last year and we knew right away she’d make a wonderful addition to WU. More from her bio:
Kristin Hacken South writes whatever comes thrumming through the void, which to date has included a few short stories, lots of academic papers, two middle grade detective stories, one set in Belgium and the other in Egypt (two places where she has traveled for work more than any others), and two adult novels, one set in Utah and the other in Connecticut (the two states where she has lived more years than any others). She lives in Atlanta and gleefully enjoys every snow-free winter day.
You can learn more about Kristin and her very cool day job on her website.
Welcome, Kristin! We’re so glad to have you with us — officially!
We all know the cliché: A good book transports the reader to a different time and place. I suggest this cliché has staying power because it’s true, but not in the way we usually think.
So many stories that I read as a child were set in the misty pan-Celtic landscape of Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland that it felt like I’d been there. I pored over Arthurian legend and gulped down Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series and The Chronicles of Prydain. I loved the stern texture of ancient magic and the serene beauty these places seemed to exude. Naturally, when I was offered the chance to visit some historical sites of ancient Irish kingship last summer, I snatched it.
Low clouds hushed the countryside as I walked across fields of closely cropped grass to the burial mounds and Bronze Age earthworks of Tara. A constant drizzling rain soaked my shoes, but the weather only enhanced the experience. I knew that misery accompanies myth.
My tour guide and traveling companions were all archaeologists, like me. Unlike me, however, none of them had a side hustle as a fiction writer.
It showed.
It showed in the way our guide stuck to careful enumeration of fact with qualifiers aplenty. He didn’t mention the fort that, it is said, collapsed under the weight of a false judgment carried out by the High King Lugaid mac Con. No one pointed out the exact spot where the tragic, doomed lovers Gráinne and Diarmuid first locked eyes during Gráinne’s wedding feast to another. Where was the humor and ill-fated hubris? The imperious beauty laced with tragedy? If nothing else, where were the leprechauns? I caught nary a whiff of smoke from the Easter Fire that St. Patrick was said to have lit nearby.
Most shocking of all, the archaeologists with me laughed as our guide mentioned an earlier attempt to excavate the Ark of the Covenant from this site. It was almost as if they didn’t believe in any of it.
Archaeologists, understandably, avoid speculation, even (especially!) when visiting places attached to age-old legend. With all due respect to my academic colleagues—and I do respect them greatly—here’s a pro tip, free of charge: If you wish to preserve the mystery and grandeur of an ancient site, don’t visit it with an archive of archaeologists.
Amongst the buzz-killing discussions of stratigraphic levels and radiocarbon dates, however, one evocative detail did slip out. Ancient sites like the Hill of Tara and Navan Fort made use of imagery known as the figure-of-eight. Shaped exactly as you might imagine, the figure-of-eight looks like the mathematical symbol for infinity. Two circular enclosures at Tara meet at exactly one point. Two conjoined enclosures at Navan Fort each contain a set of two buildings that do the same. The figure-of-eight is found carved into stone and wood, and versions of it are made into rings today.
Our archaeologist-guide explained that the figure-of-eight may have represented a “thin place” where this world and the unseen connect. As a way to channel and claim sacred power, thin places became powerful locations for ritual activity. The point of contact created a conduit between the worlds.
I suggest that we as writers regularly inhabit thin places. We, too, stand at the point of intersection between the readily apparent world and another. We hear characters having conversations that others don’t hear. We envision stories unfolding in settings others can’t see. Couldn’t this explain our sense of utter familiarity when we finally get a look at Middle Earth, Three Pines, Pemberley, Narnia, or Anne Shirley’s Prince Edward Island?
It’s a little out there, I know, but I’m not alone in using mythic metaphor to describe the writing process. Elizabeth Gilbert insists that the “big magic” of writing originates outside of the self. She describes ideas flashing across the sky, seeking someone willing to pull them to earth. I envision a writer in a field, lightning rod at the ready, positioned to act as a conduit. She finds that thin place and reports on what surges through.
Steven Pressfield (The War of Art) speaks similarly of his relationship to his Muse. He sets to work each day, and if he’s lucky, she comes poking around, attracted by his devotion to her cause. He politely invites her to come in and pull up a chair. On a good day, she stays for a while and blends her voice with his, but Pressfield must be seated at his desk, putting in the work, for the Muse to arrive. Sure, it’s mundane, but that desk channels creative power as well as any thin place as you’ll ever find.
Two other authors I’ve recently read describe a similar origin for their works of fiction. Therese Anne Fowler, in recalling how her bestselling Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald came into being, has used words like “unbidden” and “compelled.” She was “struck” and “accosted” by the story. She even entertained the idea that “Zelda had chosen [her] personally” to write the book. Barbara Kingsolver, likewise, tells of going to the home of Charles Dickens and sitting at the great man’s desk, where she felt him telling her to write Demon Copperhead on the model of David Copperfield. I envision Fitzgerald and Dickens sidling through the curtains and finding these authors poised to take note. That’s what happens when we spend time in thin places.
Fanciful? Perhaps. But, like fiction itself, that doesn’t mean it can’t also be true.
Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, notes the directional difference between getting an idea “down” and thinking it “up.” Thinking something up implies difficult solo work, creating something from nothing. Getting it down, though, is the relatively simple work of a humble drudge. We are but scribes at the intersection of the great unseen, in this view, rather than originators and gods in our own right. Writing favors the diligent, not (only) the supernally gifted.
Where do writers get their ideas? Sure, we might just be making it all up. But what if a writer is the only point of contact with an urgently real-in-its-way world that’s hidden from all others? We rub the membrane thin, and story leaks out. Or maybe we raise our lightning rods, and story flashes down our arms and onto the page. Or we open a door, and the ideas rush in. Choose your metaphor, but in every case, it is your role as a writer to document those moments of connection. Without your books, other worlds remain obscured. Without you, we will never be transported to the time and place that you alone can find.
How do your ideas travel? Do you get them down, think them up, or pull them through a hole from a reality that only you know about? How do you access your thin places? What other metaphors help you describe and continue this indescribable process?
Kristin Hacken South is happiest on the days that she works on her fiction, which to date has included a few short stories, two middle grade detective stories, and two adult novels. She lives in Atlanta, with three independent book stores within walking distance of her house. Her idea of a good time is still a day in the desert with a trowel in one hand and a notebook in the other.
[coffee]
How lovely to read of Tara this morning. When I visited it I was overcome with emotion, memories (both mine and older than mine) and the sense of a sacred place where my ancestors once gathered and I belonged. What struck me most was how it is made of the earth itself, a tunnel beneath the green grass, a portal to the underworld both in symbol and in reality.
Writing for me is going to that thin place, transcribing the dialogue and scenes often without being cognizant of the nuances and meaning until another day. Any “making up” later to connect the dots and scenes is more like a discovery of a story that’s been waiting rather than a plan that I impose.
I know that every writer doesn’t approach it this way, but I know that many do, same as in the other Arts. Following intuition over technique is not something easily taught, so it’s not often discussed. It can feel lonely when that’s what you practice. Thank you for giving it a mention today.
See, that’s the experience I expected to have there! I guess it wasn’t my story to tell. :) I love your observation about the earth — it really does feel like entering a portal, to go inside those earthworks, doesn’t it?
Hey Kristin — First, welcome aboard! So glad we’ll be receiving the gift of your beautiful and thought-provoking essays moving forward. As for the thin places, I absolutely believe! I’ve been to many of the places upon which I based my story’s second world, and I always feel the power of it. One of the most powerful examples occurred at Ephesus. Even from the spot where our tour began, near the top of the uncovered portion of the site, I looked down and saw flashes of the vibrant city featured in my story. I could even picture my Gothic host galloping down the streets to seize the harbor. This happened well before the scene existed, and it’s when I knew the scene “had to exist.” And it does.
But I also don’t think spending a lot of money on travel is required in order to find our way beyond the veil. In a very similar fashion, I “saw” a scene set on the banks of the Rhine. I did look at a few pictures online when the scene idea was in its infancy, tickling my brain, wanting to come out on the page. I visited the Rhine years after writing it, only to confirm that the scene I pictured perfectly fit the actual location. I’d “gone there” without actually, physically, visiting the place.
I absolutely adore essays that explore the woo-woo side of what we do. Because I absolutely believe that it’s been a major part of my journey. One that has made it all the more rewarding. Thanks for taking me there! Looking forward to more.
Hi, Vaughn! I thought about you as I wrote this post because you seem to live very close to those thin places, but since I haven’t read your books (yet! not yet!) I didn’t feel like I could mention you.
I love your experience at Ephesus. I’ve never had that happen at an ancient site, much as I wish it would. I think that my work as an archaeologist does make me more impervious to such things. It’s hard to turn off that left brain when so much is going on there. But then I’m rubbed raw at the most unexpected places, like when I was moved to tears inside the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, or marveling at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. I don’t know enough about the history of either place for scholar to speak louder than the writer, I guess.
Love this: “We are but scribes at the intersection of the great unseen.” Your thin place theory explains so much about how ideas pop into my brain—thank you. I look forward to your regular posts here on WU!
Thanks, Carol! I have been thinking more about that idea, actually, since I wrote it. I have a quote from The Artist’s Way over my desk that says, to whatever gods of literary creation may be listening, “I will take care of the quantity. You take care of the quality.” I love this idea, in theory, that we mostly just need to show up.
But the rest of that interview with Therese Fowler pointed out that we as writers still have a whole lot of work to put in, no matter how the seed is first planted. I agree with that, too. We do put a most personal imprint on whatever we write. And I still stand by the idea of being scribes. One of the great things about literature as opposed to science is that we are allowed to hold multiple ideas at once and proclaim them all to be true in their way.
In the inner chamber of Newgrange, there’s a bowl in one of the niches with what to me looked like knee rests carved into one rim. Pictures cascaded into my mind of a ritual that celebrated life, not death. Carrowmore, Poulnabroune, all the sites, were presented to us as burial places. But I saw portals and doorways. Thin places indeed! Not long before this journey, I ran into a thin place in Princeton, NJ., and saw something I couldn’t explain. A week later, I began writing the first draft of weird and wonderful story. That was in 2005. Since then, that story has led me to a seemingly inexhaustible well. As long as I show up at my desk, so does the magic. Thank you for a delightful post. I feel like I know you from somewhere!
Thanks for mentioning Newgrange. I have never been but I sure would like to see it if I get back to Ireland. I love your experience there!
“As long as I show up at my desk, so does the magic.” I firmly believe this too.
I just shamelessly internet stalked you and sent a message at your website. Cheers!
Hello Kristen. Thanks for breathing new life into “Where do your ideas come from?” I like the image of the writer as a thin place, a kind of membrane between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds. Ideas in your other examples come through imagined UPS deliveries of several kinds. One describes writing ideas as skyborne trout being caught by earthbound fly fishermen. Another writer sits at his desk. On lucky days, his muse shows up, and he chats with her until she says “Oh, look at the time,” and takes off. Two others see themselves as conscripts or indentured-servant scribes acting on orders. One takes hers from Zelda Fitzgerald, the other from Dickens, or from the seat of Dickens’ chair. I like all this, but I will take issue with your suggestion that, by the nature of what they do and how they do it, scientists “murder to dissect” what they study. In my view, the best science writing, like the best history is written by people with a gift for bringing to life what they study for those who AREN’T fellow scientists or historians. To me, it’s exactly the imagination that reveals to the rest of us what is otherwise hidden. Thanks again.
The reason I was in Ireland at all, actually, was for a conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that gathered together over 2000 archaeologists for three days worth of sessions on every aspect of our work. One session, dealing with the intersection of archaeology and story, was very well attended. My takeaway was that we as specialists have a duty to tell the true story in a way that is interesting to non-specialists. We are often relegated to the back of the room because wild speculation and mythic tragedy are so much stickier than footnoted facts.
I confess I did cut class on the last afternoon to hang out with the prehistorians, not my usual crowd, who instructed me in the methods of flint knapping. I was lucky not to take an eye out.
How wonderful, Kristin, to have you here as a regular! Thin places…I’ve been thinking a lot lately of the Isle of Iona (I lived there in 07-08). A 5th century Irish monk. Columba illegally copied Scriptures, started a war, and in repentance, left Ireland on a coracle with 12 followers, and landed on Iona. Legend says they started the Book of Kells, bringing it back to Ireland when the Vikings raided the western islands of Scotland. Iona is a beautiful craggy and green place, especially in winter, when the sun is low on the horizon.
I also find thin places on the blufftops above the Mississippi River, cast back to what it would have sounded like with melting glacial waters filling the valleys, making today’s river minuscule in comparison.
I agree with Barry. Thank goodness for you, bridging the analytic and the creative mind. We are a bereft people when we only live out of one side of our brain.
Yes, Iona strikes me as a place where the membrane must be very, very thin. I’ve mentioned to you how much I loved visiting Lindisfarne, whose founder, Aidan, came over from Iona. This was my first time in Ireland, though, so of course I made a beeline to see the Book of Kells!
I agree with you that thin places are everywhere. I honestly think that cathedrals, temples, and national parks are all about equal in their ability to transport. I’m also fascinated by how a place may be labeled sacred in earliest times and then it retains its holiness or sense of otherness over millennia. I mentioned the Umayyad Mosque in an earlier comment: that’s a spot where a Bronze Age god(dess? I don’t recall) was worshipped, and then it was replaced with a Roman temple, and then a Christian church, and now a mosque. The spot itself stays sacred/thin over so many changes in belief!
Welcome, Kristin! And what a lovely and relatable way to describe whatever that magic alchemy is that offers access across the membrane between real and imagined.
Thanks, Tiffany! It IS alchemy, and there are so many ways to think about it. I don’t care which metaphor is used, as long as the magic keeps working!
Hi Kristin, where can I buy Dusty Digs Giza for my fifth-grade granddaughter? Thanks!
I’ll send you a message. :)
How delightful to think of writers as scribes in thin places! I’m glad I took time to read this today. I had a Scotland experience last May, and my delight was to sit in ancient spaces and contemplate with pen and page in hand.
This is also my favorite writing practice anywhere I am–soaking in elements, giving my attention, receiving awareness, maybe even creating my own thin space! ♡♡♡♡ Thank you for putting words around this.
I love that you get to do this, Ingrid. And I love Scotland, too. Where did you go?
Yes, maybe we create our own thin spaces by virtue of being aware of them. I talk about rubbing them thin, which feels like a good mix of magic and method. But there’s no question it’s easier in those gorgeous places where things have happened.
Welcome, Kristin! This is so lovely…such a nutritious essay. As a dreamy, bookish, preacher’s kid, I think I learned early to look for thin places (even if I didn’t have that term for them). This idea really resonates, I notice, with my tendency to imagine a place and a feeling when I begin to develop a story, even before I know who might be in it.
I was raised religious, too, and I think that background is helpful for writers. We are taught early that we can communicate with something beyond ourselves, so we learn to stay open to those experiences.
Of course writers don’t have to think about the process in those terms, but we don’t have to NOT think about it that way, either. :)
I was going to have a post-retirement career writing mysteries.
The world did a flip, post-retirement turned into chronic illness at 40, and, in the middle of the year 2000, a story was vouchsafed to me, dumped in my lap by a confluence of ideas, with the instructions: “Here. You write this. You’re the only one who can.”
Over the 20+ years since, the first two volumes of a mainstream trilogy fought their way into being; I’m just really getting my teeth into the third now. Shouldn’t take but a few more years.
I like “vouchsafed.” Not sure if there’s an actual muse attached, but the feeling of being chosen for an almost-impossible task is sobering.
If you get a roomful of writers talking, I suspect many if not most will have stories like this! I agree about being chosen. It sounds like you have found your challenge just the right amount of nearly-but not-quite-impossible to sink your teeth into it. Good luck with volume three!
This is a good one. Thanks, Kristin, for passing on the idea of “thin places.” So many ways to look at it. Like Vaughn and several others here, I believe absolutely in the woo-woo side. I love the feeling I get when I look at a phrase or paragraph in my own work and I don’t remember writing it. Thin places might be places that give you ideas, or places that give you dreams. I like Barry’s angle in which writers themselves constitute thin places. And Susan’s experience of being “touched” by magic that continues to show up as long as she continues to show up at the desk reminds me of my favorite “real writer” story, in which Poul Anderson told me the secret to writing was to “apply the seat of the pants to the chair.”
You’re welcome! And thank you for your comments. It’s not nearly as glamorous as a misty Irish hillside, but BICHOK — “butt in chair and hands on keyboard” –definitely gets the job done! :)
Welcome, Kristin. What a delightful essay on “thin places.” There are also times when the veil between the here and hereafter are thin–All Hallow’s Eve, middle of the night, Midnight Mass. I often think I might whisper the stories I never got to write to a willing ear after I die, or sing the most beautiful alleluias, or enter the dreams of scientists and give them the answers they desire. I think these thoughts because of some stories have come to me fully formed (all my best ones) and I’ve heard angels sings and dreamed answers. Where indeed do ideas come from? Thank you for your lovely essay as I prepare to dash off to make some beautiful harmonies.
Yes! You are quite right. Some times are thinner than others. The ancients recognized the turning of the seasons as a “thin” time for probably the same reasons — a solstice, for instance, was the point of intersection between one kind of time and the next. There should be a term for that. :)
I love your idea of paying forward the creativity we didn’t put to use. I still have books I need to write before I die, but like our physical remains, perhaps our creative ideas can be plowed back into what remains and simply take a different form. I like it.
Thanks for this post! I believe in big magic and thin places. I visited Ireland in 2019 with my sisters and some of their friends. We mostly did some typical tourist stuff (Book of Kells! Yes!) But when the friends went home, my sisters and I stayed and visited Glendalough, home of our mother’s people. I had that sense of a thin place, seeing the graves of my mother’s family, walking in what felt like a fairy forest. After the pandemic, the idea of a novel where a woman is pulled into ancient Ireland during the pandemic came to me. It continues to poke at me while I try to finish a last revision of my WIP. I want to finish that project because skipping forward seems like a bad idea. But I’ve been reading Irish mythology in the meantime. I long to return to Ireland for a different kind of trip, a visit to those ancient thin places.
I long for more time on the Emerald Isle too. I didn’t see nearly enough of it while I was there. Good luck with your WIP and with finding those thin places if/when you return!
Welcome to the WU team, Kristin. Enjoyed the post very much – the writing wisdom and the bits of humor. I could envision that trip with a team of scientists who tried their best to bore you out of your mind.
I tend to write down as characters come to me and ask me to write their stories. Not real people like the examples your shared but characters who become real to me, and hopefully to my readers.
Love this line. “Writing favors the diligent, not (only) the supernally gifted.” We do have to be ready for that person who is going to break the fourth wall so to speak.
To be fair, I’m sure they weren’t as bored as I was. I think I was the only person there who didn’t specialize in Bronze Age Ireland. I’m probably just as nitpicky when the topic turns to Egypt. :)
I love to hear stories of characters coming to chat, whether they start out as fictional or not! Talking about them as breaking the fourth wall is a great way to think about it.
Cemeteries. So thin. I went to one nearby that I’d somehow never visited in May 2020 — it was a gorgeous clear blue day and we NEEDED to leave home; you remember how it was then — mostly for atmosphere for a scene I could have written without it. The scene and the woman who died but wasn’t quite gone came alive in ways I never imagined, and other scenes in that book and scenes in a different WIP and a novella I hadn’t imagined writing at that point came as a direct result.
Thanks for naming them.
Yes, cemeteries definitely ooze story, don’t they? There’s a particularly beautiful one here in Atlanta, the Oakland Cemetery. They lean into the thinness by holding regular events throughout the year where they have costumed actors tell the life stories of the people buried there. It’s a great way to learn more about the history of this area. I love that you value it too!
Wonderful post, Kristin! And welcome to Writer Unboxed! My lifelong love of fairytale, folklore and mythology plays a major part in sparking story ideas, as does history. Combine that with what I observe and learn about in ”real life” and a rich brew develops in the cauldron of story. I always feel something uncanny at play, and especially so when I visit the locations of my stories and/or the places of my ancestry – sometimes these two are the same (the Celtic world you mention) and sometimes different (Transylvania, Orkney, the Faroe Islands, the Baltic region.) Inspiration is everywhere, even in the mundane.
Juliet, I’m delighted to hear from you. We’ve never met, but I hoped to see you at UnConference so that I could thank you for a post that meant a lot to me. In it, you mentioned a book that I have since read and re-read and studied and loved: The Once and Future Witches, by Alix Harrow. I could go on about what I loved about it, but I’ll save it for when/if I actually do meet you. :) Meanwhile, I’m glad to know that we’re also simpatico with regard to how the cauldron is filled!
Hi there, Kristin! I loved reading your essay and all the comments that flooded below in response. I agree with many that travel and being out in the world are often where I have experienced thin places that led me back to the page. Certainly they span the globe and there’s likely some that are recognizable in memory. And yet, I have also felt the thinness that directs me to story fuel in dreams, certain poems, music, art…there’s an abundance of sources to pull from. That’s my phrase – I pull my stories out. This is probably because it requires effort! :)
What a good reminder — we can identify and benefit from thin places in the works of other creative people. And you’re absolutely right that nothing is easy or automatic about it. Getting to the thin place is just the beginning of the process, isn’t it?
I loved your post, Kristin. Thank you for reminding us to look beyond the the “normal” and be open to other worlds and experiences. Australia has its magic places. When turning off the A7 highway in Queensland to go into Carnarvon Gorge, I felt the “pull” of the land and all it had endured over millennia and knew I had to use it in my fifth thriller. The Gorge itself is a series of wonders with its Aboriginal rock art, the Amphitheatre, etc and alive with the spirit of the earth. Another place is Hanging Rock, made famous by the book and the movie, “Picnic at Hanging Rock”. It is definitely spiritual alive.
In my third book the plot needed the main characters to find a diary written by a young Irish girl about her life in 1865. It flowed out of me as though I were channelling it straight from her ghost. She was fictional but she came to me so alive and fully formed and even after I finished what I needed for the book I felt almost compelled to complete her story as so much else happened to her. I could even “see” her as an old lady. Very spooky, but wonderful.
Your post has made me convinced more than ever that she wants her story told. Thank you.
What a wonderful experience you have described! And your description of Australia makes it also sound like a magical place, indeed. “Alive with the spirit of the earth…”
Hello Kristen…found your essay through a link on Nancy Gardner’s blog/newsletter. Yes, yes, yes…writing from thin places does feel like transcription! So many of your expressions are quotable. I love this one: here’s a pro tip, free of charge: If you wish to preserve the mystery and grandeur of an ancient site, don’t visit it with an archive of archaeologists.
I visited Tara with three gay men…a brother and two of his friends. That added a whole other dimension to the experience (:
Another bit…I experienced a frisson of delight, even magic, on a dig run by Parks Canada. Public history became personal history. https://acadiann.substack.com/p/digging-in-the-their-basement
Looking forward to more of “whatever presses most firmly upon” your “mind”
I’m delighted that you found me here and shared your experiences. And now I want to go digging in Canada. :)