Welcome to The Liminal Space!

So what is this place?

Looking back on it from some distance, I realize that The Liminal Space began on a porch on Hague Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the summer of 1991 when I moved into that house with three friends from Macalester College. Over the next three years, that porch -- which was really just your ordinary midwestern front porch, too hot in the summer and a retreat for hasty smokers only in the Hoth-like Minnesota winter chill -- would be the venue for countless conversations that went late into the night (and often well into the next morning), fueled by Leinenkugel’s, Jim Beam, and far too many cigarettes. I am sure that details of selected evenings in that house will find their way into future posts, but for the moment I will just say that as much as I learned at Macalester -- which was then and is still a terrific place to go to school -- the nights spent on that porch had as much of an impact on my education as any class I ever took.

School may have been where we picked up the basic ideas of all that we were studying, but that porch was the place where we processed it all and did the far more important work of figuring out who we were, why we were, and what the seemingly limitless world that was unfolding in front of us was all about. Music, movies, books, TV, politics, and even cooking -- David Grace, one of the editors of this blog, had spent a year of high school in Italy and taught us all the important lesson that “the difference between eating and eating well is often about ten minutes in preparation” and blew our minds by transforming a simple grilled cheese sandwich into what seemed like a gourmet delight by using three kinds of cheese and adding olive oil, oregano, and prosciutto -- anything you can think of was dissected from every angle on that porch at some point or another. Mario Costello -- another editor -- lived around the corner and was practically a resident given the amount of time he spent in the basement practicing with The Grovers, the first of his many Twin Cities bands. Mario was the first to articulate something I think we all sensed: that we were all pretty much irretrievable and hopeless geeks, and the faster we embraced that, the happier we would be.

In every place I have lived since then, I have been lucky enough to find a space like that porch. In Providence, it was two plastic chairs and a cement wall where I spent many Friday nights in the company of Will Shotwell -- another potential blog contributor -- and a host of other friends, where we would spend Friday evenings reflecting on the joys and frustrations of our fledgling careers in teaching and other pursuits depending on who stopped by. In that space we celebrated comings together, talked each other through breakings apart, argued about anything and everything under the sun, and chased too many pizzas (you know it’s too many when you can redeem the “ten boxes for a free pizza” deal more than twice a year) with too much Scotch. Dave turned up in 2000 after several years in Taiwan to do the Brown MAT program that had brought me to Rhode Island in the first place, providing an unexpected gift of a year of living with one of the people who knew me as well as anyone. Eight years in Providence provided a remarkable community of educators, academics, doctors, journalists and photojournalists, writers, professional chefs, artists, and more. The East Side became one big porch that included countless poker games (more pizzas and a particularly memorable evening in Chad Galts’s garrett off Hope Street when John Freidah walked into my world bearing a sweaty box of what was still at that point called Kentucky Fried Chicken), pool parlors, evenings cooking (really learning to cook, for real, inspired by the rise of Iron Chef and the Food Channel back when it focused on actual chefs and actual food) together, my discovery of Terrence Malick and what it actually meant to study and teach film and literature in an authentic way...I could go on, but you get the idea that Providence will always be the place where, at least in an intellectual sense, I became the me that I now recognize.

The porch was harder to find when I moved to California in July 2003 -- which I did as a single 33 year old not knowing a soul in the town where I would live for the next six years, but also knowing that I needed to leave the safety of the East Side -- which as opposed to the vastness of California and the Bay Area, is about two square miles -- if I wanted to continue to grow. Rhode Island is a wonderful place, but after eight years in an environment where people consider any destination that can’t be reached in a half hour as a major undertaking, it was impossible to pass up the opportunity to see more of the world. That choice was not without its price. As anyone who has lived in different regions can tell you, community forms differently in the West, and it certainly forms differently in one’s thirties than it does in one’s twenties. Work moved to the center of life for the better part of a decade, and the value of porches past was magnified by their absence. Trips to the East and Midwest -- and a particularly memorable month with Will in Southeast Asia -- provided moments of rejuvenation, and my belated discovery of Facebook provided a way to maintain -- and even rediscover -- connections from various pasts as I navigated the transition into middle age, which involved the usual sorting through the baggage acquired over forty-plus years of family life and deeper history and some unusual surprises thrown into my personal and professional worlds. Surviving that process required a retreat from the porch into my personal storm cellar -- and again, I am confident that realizations from that stretch of mostly solitude will find their way into writing at some point, as they have been every bit as important to my sense of who I am and what the world as anything else -- but when I was ready to venture back out, I found a new porch -- or in this case, more of a deck given the house we now occupy and the amount of time my wife and our friends spend on it, given the climate in our town of Fairfax -- ready and waiting.

So...what is this place -- and why now?

Though there are many ways in which the digital world and our dependence on it is unfortunate, it does have the benefit of providing ways to connect (and I say this with some confidence as one of the millions who have met their partners online, which is a story for another time). The idea is to make this site a virtual porch of sorts, and we need spaces like this more than ever as there is so much to talk about at present. We are in uncharted waters in ways that would have been hard to imagine (and yet, all too easy to predict) two years ago, but if there is an upside, times like ours catalyze the creation of fantastic art, film, TV, music, and more. The authors and editors of this space come from a variety of backgrounds, live in different parts of the country (and hopefully world before too long), and have an interest in starting conversations that are relevant, stimulating, and hopefully most of all, fun. So expect some of everything -- including calls for guest contributors -- and enjoy.

In the words of the immortal Marty DeBerghi, “enough of my yakkin’. Let’s boogie!”

#Welcome #Hoth #Minnesota #Winter #Macalester #TerrenceMalick #California #SpinalTap