A Historian’s Take on Place as Character

My book ONE GOAL (2018), represented a departure for me. While still utilizing all of my training as a historian, particularly in terms of digging into research to find answers to my questions, I engaged with new forms of writing, especially narrative nonfiction, facing challenges in terms of how the finished product would play to a mainstream audience while still working within my own scholarly strategies. A critical component of the story was the book’s setting, Lewiston, Maine, as a character alongside mayors and coaches and refugee families. From the outline of the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul to the storefronts of Lisbon Street to the aromas of the soccer field’s “Snack Shack”, I relied heavily on the sensory of the physical backdrop to write about the racial politics of a city and its soccer team.

It is critical to set the physical stage, differentiating between location and place, probing how an area is understood and described, its history, and so on. Writing about place means telling a location’s stories in order to enhance the telling of the bigger pictures, the layers of a story’s main characters and the spaces they occupy, as well as their evolving culture. In ONE GOAL, this meant a deep dive into a postindustrial New England mill town to tell a soccer story, from migrant Franco culture to the centrality of the Androscoggin River; from the different foods sold at a sporting event and what they revealed about who was on the field and in the stands, to the downtown “mom and pop” shops that sold goods to entice the newcomer African refugee population. While fiction’s giants have made place central to their stories, it is worthy to ask how place can drive historical narrative, making better our answers to “what happened?”