Issue 14: This Must Be the Place
Hey there!
As I (Alex) write this, it’s an ungodly ninety-two degrees outside, and my street–cramped, sometimes dingy, and objectively not the most beautiful street out there–is at least silent. Also, it’s my street, which means that no matter how loud or crowded or hot it gets, I’ll always love it, down to the cracked sidewalks and the feral cats winding their way through the backyard.
Place is like that. Whether it’s gorgeous or grungy, if it’s your place and you’ve committed to loving it, in some sense it’ll love you back. You’ll find yourself memorizing its weird nooks and crannies, getting comfortable on its side streets or backroads. This month, both our essays try to communicate that sometimes complicated love, with Alex discussing Over the Garden Wall’s autumn netherworld and Claudia visiting Prince Edward Island in the pages of the Emily of New Moon trilogy.
Alex on Over the Garden Wall
Created by Patrick McHale and first airing on Cartoon Network in November 2014, Over the Garden Wall is an eerie, gorgeous miniseries steeped in autumnal imagery. Without remembering quite how they got there, stepbrothers Wirt and Greg travel through the Unknown, a mysterious landscape with old-time Americana overtones. Their journey is a reflection on the interconnectedness of death and rebirth, and a celebration of the liminality of autumn, the season stretched between life and death.
That misty, murky fall is key to Over the Garden Wall’s aesthetic appeal, but it also offers up fantastic examples of what the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro calls “eye-protein, not eye-candy,” visual details emphasizing a character’s inner journey. In the Unknown, early autumn, shrouded in mist, transforms into a vibrant harvest time before dissolving into chilly November rains. Last comes late autumn—winter, really—snowy and deathly cold. Of course Wirt, the main protagonist, almost succumbs to that cold; in the Unknown, there’s no progress without pain, and no rebirth without death.
The series’ second episode, “Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee,” tackles this theme with its signature spooky charm when Wirt, Greg, and a cranky talking bluebird named Beatrice stumble into the town of Pottsfield. At first, Pottsfield seems like a quaint farming community, full of black cats, giant turkeys, and ripe pumpkins. More creepily, it’s also full of people dressed in corn husks, whose faces are hidden behind carved jack-o’-lantern masks. As punishment for barging into the town’s private harvest celebration, Wirt, Greg, and Beatrice are sentenced to hours of farm work. During their final assignment—digging holes in an abandoned field—the three become convinced that they’ve been sent out to dig their own graves and try to escape.
Before he can make a run for it, Wirt discovers the true purpose of the harvest celebration when a skeleton climbs out of one of the holes and pops on a pumpkin head. The townspeople aren’t murderers, but some of them do need to be dug out of their graves at harvest time: Pottsfield is an afterlife that people “don’t tend to pass through.” But Wirt, Beatrice, and Greg do escape, even though Enoch, the town’s leader, hints that their escape is only temporary: “You’ll join us someday.” That threat aside, Pottsfield is actually a kind and kooky community—skeletons dance together in their new pumpkin heads, and the only punishment Wirt and his friends get for interrupting a probably sacred ceremony is a couple hours of manual labor.
Visually and in its storytelling, “Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee” is a compression of the series as a whole. It begins in early autumn, when the world is vibrant but also misty and mysterious. Wirt, aloof to his brother and Beatrice, chooses the path to Pottsfield, landing them all in a potentially dangerous situation. As the day winds down and his fears rise, the sky darkens. Finally, at the end, the landscape is bare, brown, and ominous, and Wirt can’t take the pressure anymore. He breaks down, telling Beatrice “I was wrong […] I don’t know how to get us home.” In order to move forward, he has to kill his own ego and ask for help.
Wirt admitting to his own wrongdoing and accepting help—“dying to himself,” to use a Puritan term especially suited to the series’ Americana-inspired setting—is a consistent plot point throughout the series. But death is also made more literal in Over the Garden Wall with Pottsfield and other settings like it: transitioning, transformative places where nothing is exactly what it seems. Autumn is mellow and beautiful, but, like Wirt’s head, it’s full of horrors, bad turns and breaking points. Striking out into the unknown is scary, and facing your own weaknesses is scarier, even painful. At the end of the journey, though, there just might be a new and transformed life. In a bare field, skeletons can kick up their feet and dance. This time, death is a town to pass through, not a permanent resting place. In the Unknown, the season changes, and anything is possible.
Claudia on the Emily Trilogy
I’ve been on a L.M. Montgomery kick recently, reading six of her books in April. I try not to worry too much about why I read what I read, but it’s fair to say that a longing for beauty and nostalgia had something to do with it, and few authors do beauty and nostalgia better than Montgomery.
Published in the nineteen-twenties and set at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, Montgomery’s Emily trilogy meticulously recreates life in rural Prince Edward Island, detailing the stunning beauty, close communal bonds, and ironclad tradition that make it both a wonderful and a stifling place to grow up. Featuring an orphan protagonist determined to become a successful writer, Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, and Emily’s Quest are excellent examples of the Künstlerroman, the artist’s novel tracing his or her coming-of-age. What I was struck by while reading them was their rejection of a common trope of the artist’s novel: the need to leave home to find success and creative fulfillment.
Emily comes to live at New Moon Farm after the death of her father, and although she struggles to see eye-to-eye with her relatives, she feels an immediate kinship with the land. “I feel as if I had always lived here,” she writes. The farm also becomes a wellspring for her writing, inspiring poems extolling the seasons, and her mature work as well. At the same time, she chafes under the small-mindedness of the local community, who dismiss her ambitious nature as putting on airs.
The conflict between home as a place of creative fulfillment and as a place of suffocating conformity peaks in book two, when an editor offers Emily a job at a New York City magazine. “New Moon is a dear, quaint, lovely spot,” the editor says, but “[y]ou must have the stimulus of association with great minds—the training that only a great city can give.”
At thirteen, I would have longed for Emily to go. At twenty-five, my feelings are more mixed. Many artist’s novels have their protagonists leave home, and the idea that you need a big city and big opportunities to make quality work is reflected in real life as well. How many times have we heard people talk about moving to New York City or Hollywood to pursue a career? There’s nothing wrong with leaving home, of course—but conversely, there’s nothing wrong with staying either.
Some people may think they need to go to the city to find their creative voice, but I’m desperately searching for proof of the opposite. For a long time, I assumed that I would leave West Virginia because that’s what people did once they grew up and graduated college. And then I realized I didn’t want to.
Practicality and family ties played into the decision to stay, but so did the fact that I love where I live. It’s beautiful and complicated and baked into my bones. I have no desire to leave it. I just need to know that staying put doesn’t mean giving up on my ambitions.
So I found myself agreeing with Emily when she turns down the editor’s offer, knowing that leaving New Moon would mean leaving behind the most potent source of her joy and inspiration. Yes, it will be hard, and yes, her neighbors won’t always understand her. She wants to do it anyway. One of the most beautiful things, in a series full of beauty, is that Emily succeeds. She braves gossip, a bad engagement, and heartbreak, but she writes her books and creates the life she dreamed for herself, still planted firmly on Prince Edward Island.
There is a way to read this conclusion as a nod to domesticity, saying it codes Emily as radical but not too radical since she stays in the domestic sphere of New Moon and marries her childhood sweetheart instead of braving life as a single bluestocking. That reading seems disingenuous, though, especially considering that the novels are highly autobiographical, and that Montgomery was also a deeply determined writer with an enduring love for Prince Edward Island. Instead, I prefer to think of the Emily books as aspirational. Reading them, I feel that I can stay in the place that made me, and still grow and write–maybe even grow to write something great.
As always, thank you so much for reading! Hey, Kid! will be back in June.
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia