Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home by Cathryn Hankla

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home by Cathryn Hankla Emily Masters (bio) Cathryn Hankla. Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2018. 288 pages. Softcover. $20.00. In her essay collection Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home, Cathryn Hankla focuses on ways the concept of home manifests in various aspects of her life. Hankla is a poet, novelist, and has written a variety of essays including the ones gathered in Lost Places. Her previously published works include Fortune Teller Miracle Fish (2011), Great Bear (2016), and Galaxies (2017). In Lost Places, she takes readers on a journey to explore many of the places she has physically called home as well as the homes she finds in spiritual places and in other people. The collection includes previously published content, such as "Neighborhood of [End Page 109] Desire," "The Final Frontier," and "Natural Disasters," alongside fresh content for her readers including "God's Eyebrow," an essay examining Hankla's relationship to her mother; "Invisible Cities," a meditation on fighting fears far from home; and "The Indispensable Condition," which offers a place for Hankla to pause and question her beliefs. Themes in Hankla's essay collection include homesickness, staying versus leaving, heartbreak, solitude, loss, love, family, and spirituality. She confronts stereotypes about Appalachia by portraying a complex region throughout her essays, revealing a diversity of experiences. She also paints herself in a complex light, sharing with readers both her triumphs and pitfalls in her search for home. Hankla's writing evokes a wide range of emotional response. Often, readers will find themselves laughing out loud but then will find themselves biting back tears. Hankla uses humor to address moments in her life when she feels like she is losing her sense of self, turning many moments of reflection into chances to connect to readers using laughter. The humor in the collection is balanced by Hankla's ability to turn a phrase, to express descriptions poetically, making scenes come to life on the page and creating emotions readers will feel as if they are their own. In her essay, "Cleaning out the House," Hankla writes, "No substitute for the self, a house can still be a surrogate, experimental self, a personal cabinet of curiosities, an expression of one's tastes and travels, dreams, expectations—and neuroses." Throughout the collection, Hankla reveals herself through her definitions of home. Readers get a glimpse of who she is, of her failed relationships, of her triumphs, of her doubts and vulnerabilities, through a tour of her various homes, both ones in which she dwells like in "Dream House" and ones she returns to again and again like Hankla's writing community in "Scarlet Tanager." [End Page 110] In "Lost Places," the collection's title essay, Hankla characterizes Chaco Canyon in New Mexico as a place she travels for spiritual renewal and reconnection to herself. She is drawn to Chaco because of the mystery of the history, the hidden pieces she likes to imagine, just as she enjoys writing in these essays to uncover aspects of herself and those places which have affected her life. Like all the essays in the collection, the title essay is full of research and literary references Hankla uses to reinforce her themes of home and of self-examination. One of the best essays in the collection, "My Life in Snakes," traces the ways in which snakes have slithered into Hankla's life at seemingly every turn, a constant in a world where at times, her definition of home is forever shifting. The snakes are haunting, yet familiar, primordial. The shift from fear to familiarity shows how adaptable humans are to make any place their home, although some homes might call out to us more than others. Hankla's writing throughout the essays will be relatable to readers who have ever felt out of place, homesick, or found a fluidity to their definitions of home. While almost all of the essays in Lost Places fit in with themes of home, "Place as Language" sticks out like a sore thumb. It is more a meditation on novelist William Goyen's work than an examination on Hankla...