Meeting Baltimore: Finding a Literary Sense of Place
By Sydney Alexander, written August 2022
I came into my internship at Yellow Arrow Publishing this summer with a few goals. Given my interest in English and creative writing, I wanted experience in the publishing world, from marketing to editing. I hoped to connect with published writers and get involved with my local community through events. However, the biggest pull factor for me was the opportunity to learn about Baltimore, the city Yellow Arrow is based in. I grew up in Howard County, where the city was a neighbor, not a home. Returning from my first year of college in Vermont, my goal was to get to know Charm City, and I am pleased to say, I did just that.
I didn’t come to my internship with a sole interest in English. As a geography major, I took classes at UMBC during the summer, learning the basics of ArcGIS which, put most simply, is a tool to make maps and analyze data. What this means is that, when I was not working on various tasks for Yellow Arrow, I was looking at a lot of maps of Baltimore. A lot!
Though geography and publishing may seem to have few overlaps, I feel that these two experiences supplemented each other greatly. It is one thing to look at a map of a place, analyzing streets, population demographics, buildings, vegetation—anything that may be quantified in points, lines, or polygons. Yet that was only one way to get to know the city. Sure, I knew objectively—in shapes, numbers, and statistics—what Baltimore was like, but I hardly knew anything beyond that. Yellow Arrow became the literary lens through which I met Baltimore.
Through my internship, I discovered a whole network connecting various literary nodes of the city, visiting local libraries and bookstores, including the Ivy Bookshop and Greedy Reads. I even learned of Yellow Arrow’s partnerships with many of these places. I attended the Guinness Arts & Drafts Festival, where I wandered past stalls of local artists selling their art, listened to Baltimore-based music groups, and watched as Yellow Arrow poets read their work. There, women writers in the Yellow Arrow community told me of their homes in Federal Hill and on St. Paul Street. From all this, a new image of the city began to sublimate in my mind. It was a place where women lived, worked, and wrote. Women were inspired here.
As the summer 2022 Event and Community Engagement Intern, most of my work for Yellow Arrow revolved around social media, creating posts, and scheduling events. However, I was still given the opportunity to try my hand at copyediting with Yellow Arrow’s writers-in-residence’s 2022 publication, I (want to) love you, Baltimore. Here, the writers-in-residence explored their relationships with the city. I discovered that it was both something like what it was to me, yet still something different.
To me, Baltimore is a seaport with colorful row houses rearranging the visible light spectrum. It is the elegant homes of Roland Park, where old trees arch their backs over bike lanes and traffic. It is Miss Shirley’s on Cold Spring Lane and Atomic Books in Hampden. Stereotypically, Baltimore is the Old Bay and crab paraphernalia at every turn. It is the husk of a building where there once was a Barnes & Noble; it is the curvature of the beltway cinching around the city’s perimeter and I-83 South feeding into the streets.
To the writers-in-residence, Baltimore is still a city framed by ramped highways (I-95, to name another). It is still a place of home-cooked food, music, and bookstores. But to these women, it is also the neighborhoods I have not visited: Fells Point. Druid Hill. Canton Park. Baltimore to them is also the city lights gilding late night activity; it is the parks for dates and heartbreak. My mental map filled itself in.
All this is to say, I realize now how important a sense of place is to writing. Many great authors draw upon their home states in their writing: Karen Russell writes of the Everglades in Florida, where she grew up; Charles Frazier of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina; Beth Wetmore describes the bleak lands of Odessa, a small town in West Texas; Stephen King is all but synonymous with Maine. Their depictions of their home states suggest an intimate understanding of life in these places. In some ways, reading their work—and reading the poems of our Writers-in-Residence—feels like a guided tour from a local. Yellow Arrow, where women write Baltimore, has gifted me with a more intimate relationship with the city.
Now, as I near the end of my internship, I think, Baltimore, charmed to meet you!
To learn more about Baltimore and places to write see a blog written by Vignette Managing Editor Siobhan McKenna: yellowarrowpublishing.com/news/inspiring-locations-to-write-baltimore-mckenna. And join us tonight for the reading of I (want to) love you, Baltimore. Learn more and RSVP here.
Sydney Alexander is a rising sophomore at Middlebury College in Vermont studying English and geography. She grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland, but enjoys the fact that she has lived all over the country, including North Carolina, California, and Wisconsin. Her work has been published online in Hunger Mountain Review.
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