Is Place an Overlooked Character in Writing?
An Interview with Enid Shomer
By Courtney Clute
Enid Shomer is the author of six books of poetry and three books of fiction. She also edited the popular anthology, All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, The New Criterion, and others. She has earned the Iowa Fiction Prize, Poetry’s Eunice Tietjens Prize, two NEA fellowships in poetry, and the gold medal in fiction from the Florida Book Awards. In 2012, she received the Florida Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing. NPR designated her novel, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, as one of the six best books of the year. Enid's tenth book, Riptide: New and Selected Poems, was published by Blair in June 2026.
Courtney Clute: I love the idea of place being a character. Can you explain what you mean?
Enid Shomer: I suppose it is a slight overstatement to say that place can act as character, but in many ways it can and does. I’m not talking about place as a character in science fiction or fantasy, such as a haunted house. So, I don’t mean place that is given agency, that is supernaturally able to affect change in the world. I'm speaking of place as it adds emotional heft and color to a story. Whether it is the natural landscape or the human-built landscape, our surroundings affect and reflect our behavior, our moods, our histories, our ambitions. What I am talking about is usually subtle. It could be the way light sifts through a copse of trees and the effect of that light on the character standing there. It is the way mood is reflected in landscape, sometimes bringing a whole new perspective. For example, if you write a story set at the beach, it's going to have a different tonality and flavor than a story set in a ski lodge.
The sky in a story can add a dimension that captures emotions and feelings that are hard to describe and are so subtle that perhaps only the sky can reflect them because they are below the level of consciousness. Consider where your story is happening and its effect on the characters, so you don’t end up with a colorless sketch instead of a location with its own emotional tenor, its own range of feeling and possibility.
Clute: What do you mean when you say place is overlooked?
Shomer: I mean a simple absence, something missing from the tale, when place isn’t given enough prominence. When writing lacks place, it is colorless, less memorable, less authentic, generic. Writers should always remember to marshal all their senses—sight, touch, smell, etcetera to conjure a location. If you look at the work of the southern writer Harry Crews you immediately become aware of the setting of his stories and novels. Harry grew up poor in rural Georgia, and his stories could not be set anywhere but where he has put them—in the bald cypress swamps, in the red clay of his native state, in the impoverished churches, schools and mercantile exchanges. They would simply lose their character, their identity, if they were set anywhere else. His work is specific to those trees and those swamps. It's also specific to the speech of the region, to the characters’ dialects and accents. The use of local speech patterns can help readers identify a place or establish the way speech patterns embody and convey social class, poverty versus wealth, and a whole host of subtle social cues. As Grace Paley, the inimitable New York city short story writer said, there are two things people always want to know about other people—blood and money. And they discover them through the way people talk and act, which is always particular to place.
Clute: How does Florida play a role as a character in your writing?
Shomer: Because I have lived in Florida during part of my childhood and most of my adult life, it is central to how I perceive the world. Several critics have said that for me, the landscape is an extension of my own body, whether it's beaches, mangrove swamps, pine forests, etcetera.
Clute: Do you believe you have to live in a place for a long time or be intimately familiar with it to use it as place in your writing?
Shomer: That is an excellent and important question and I think my answer will surprise you. No, you don't have to live in a place for years and years to use it in your work. Here, I would point to travel writing as the stellar example of understanding place without spending your life there. I like to refer people to the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the United States in the first half of the 19th century for nine months and wrote the landmark book Democracy in America, focusing especially on our economics, politics, and national character. His commentary is still relevant and insightful today. He is one of the masters of connecting place with identity, especially in regard to the unique shape of our democracy. If you haven't read his work I highly recommend it.
Another excellent travel book that illustrates this point is In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin. This book is also interesting because of its experimental structure. It is divided into a total of 97 separate sections, some of which are as short as one paragraph. Chatwin's life in Patagonia became nomadic, and this structure reflects and reinforces that wandering, a kind of placelessness that functions as place.
Clute: Your novel, The Twelve Room of the Nile, is set in 1849 and follows Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert as they cruised down the Nile River in separate boats. With a setting that happens halfway around the world and over 150 years ago, how were you able to capture place as a character?
Shomer: I did a lot of research! It took me seven years to write the book. Fortunately, I had lived in the Middle East, so I didn't have to look up every little detail, such as nicknames for things, curse words in Arabic, etc. I also had access to the actual diaries that my main characters kept, as well as a journal by a servant which I attributed to a major character in the novel. It was comforting to know that no one is alive now from that time.
This gave me a certain freedom just knowing there were no survivors of that place and time to say, “Oh, no that's not the color of pack camels,” or “No, that's not how the food smelled.” I enjoyed writing the book because I enjoyed reading extensively about the period. For example, I learned how class functioned in British society in the mid 19th century. Here's a juicy tidbit: Wealthy employers assigned common names to their servants—Jane was popular—completely obliterating their real names, their real identities. This shocked me—the crassness of it, the way it dehumanized people.
Clute: In your new book of poems, Riptide, did you pick up on place throughout your poetry across 40 years? What did you notice in terms of theme around place?
Shomer: I have lived all over the state of Florida, and that was very helpful in establishing place since North Florida and South Florida are so radically different from each other and I have lived in both. I have found the speech patterns of North Florida particularly fascinating. They have a certain gentility. For example, an air conditioning repairman once told me, “You know, ma’am, AC is very forgiving.” I don't think I could have heard that in Washington, DC, where I was born. Living in Cedar Key, which was then a fishing community, provided other examples of speech patterns.
I think Florida became more important to me as the years went by. Eventually, I felt like my body was an extension of the land and vice versa.
I lived on Sanibel Island for three years. A lot of sea creatures live there and shelling is popular. I walked there every day for three years and learned to pay attention to what was happening on a very minute scale. I began to notice the different kinds of low and high tides. Or I might see egg cases of baby animals and then nothing for months. I became more and more interested in sea and bird life, especially native species.
Clute: What advice would you give an emerging writer in regard to place?
Shomer: Sometimes it's entertaining and instructive to experiment with place in your writing. Change the place and see how it affects the behaviors and attitudes of your characters. Start small. Describe the physical landscape, how the trees bend, what sort of wind it takes to knock down a palm frond. What is the sound of the wind rustling through areca palms? What birds nest there? Are the birds safe from predators? And does the lack of safety reflect how the character feels? These are just some of the many ways place can enrich your work.
Courtney Clute’s work has appeared in Passages North, Fractured Literary, Ghost Parachute, Flash Frog, and more. Courtney's chapbook, The Fermi Paradox, was published with Alien Buddha Press. Her flash fiction has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of the 2023 Creative Pinellas Professional Artist Grant. You can find her online on Bluesky at @courtneyclute.bsky.social or her website www.courtneyclute.com.
