Place Name City

What's your favorite place called? Do places ever really live up to their names? Maybe only in stories.

The writer Marcel Proust devoted at least one long chapter of his seven-novel masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past to place names. I realize calling Proust a "writer" is like calling "Moby Dick" a book about a fish, but at least it tells us what he does (so brilliantly). I read it some time ago, wondering why place names meant so much to him.

Now, I think I know. Besides having their own significance, place names are something every writer wants to get right, in order to capture and intrigue our readers. Some place names can sound deliberately dreary (Dickens was a master at this) and others, make you wish you see them. Others are simply the names that each setting most richly deserves (like, say, the Shire in Middle Earth).

The place names in the Beat Street series are all real--New York, Greenwich Village, Pittsburgh, Hammond, Indiana, Chicago. I don't get to have too much fun naming them, but in case I ever write about a more fictional setting, I have started a collection of place names that might find their way into a book or story some day.

My favorite right now is called The Inn at Starlight Lake. There actually is such a lake in Pennsylvania, and I stayed there once on the recommendation of a co-worker. I was with several good friends, and though I thought it would be impossibly romantic, the inn was much like other inns. The lake was pretty and not too chilly, and when you swam at night you could see a canopy of stars. Yet, somehow, I felt, the place never lived up to its name, or at least, how I imagined it would be when hearing the name.

What would that be? I'm not sure, exactly. It might be lit up so brightly by the moon and stars you would need no flashlights on the beach; so warm you would need no fire, though you might want one anyway. I imagine the kind of inn you might see in an English countryside, surrounded by woods, with great stone fireplaces and a staircase as broad as a room.

But that's the thing about place names. They give us more to imagine, which can only be a good thing if you're a writer. And of course, Beat Street isn't real, but instead a composite of all the places Ruby knows, as a member of the Beat Generation. Part of Beat Street's subtext is the book written by Beat Generation legend Jack Kerouac, called On the Road.

The book takes us across America, and while it stops at different places, the main pride of place is the road itself, always calling us to keep moving, to see more, do more, experience more, and that's what propels Ruby too. Though she is still too young to do a lot of traveling, she has already managed to cross half the country by book two.

We'll have to see where book three leads her.

Meanwhile, I'm going to collect more place names--and if I find anything interesting, I'll let you know.


Starlight photo: Tony Faiola