by Peter Wood
Peter Wood discusses the role of nostalgia in his fiction as well as that of others. Be sure to read Peter’s latest story, “Une Time Machine, S’il Vous Plait,” in our [March/April issue, on sale now!]
Margaret Atwood and I both grew up in large Canadian cities and our fathers ran summer camps in rural Ontario. Atwood’s father, a forest entomologist, took his family from Toronto into the wilds of Ontario to live with graduate students. As a teenager, Atwood worked as a camp counselor for three years.
I tell you this, because our family lived at the northern Ontario summer camp my Dad ran for the Ottawa Boys Club every summer until we moved to Florida. I worked for three years as a camp counselor in college. No need to cue the Twilight Zone music, but the settings of two of Atwood’s short story collections—Moral Disorder and Cats Eye—spoke to me because of her descriptions of rustic Ontario in the summer and cold dark winters in Toronto.
Like Atwood, I often use my own memories to embellish my writing. “Une Time Machine, S’il Vous Plait” has scenes in a summer camp in northern Ontario and sections in the dead of winter in Toronto and Ottawa in the 1970s. Those scenes were some of the easiest in the short story to put to paper, because they are still vivid to me. Their impressions are much stronger than memories of much more recent events.
Running on the Raleigh, North Carolina, greenway, I get strong waves of nostalgia. If there’s a nip in the air or the leaves are changing color, or the sky is overcast with a light frigid drizzle, my mind floods with memories of Ottawa, Canada where I lived until eighth grade. Sunny, hot, and humid? No problem. Then my mind wanders to Tampa, Florida, where I graduated from high school.
Hardwiring of formative memories is true for most people. That’s why Kurt Vonnegut, along with futuristic works like “Harrison Bergeron” and Sirens of Titan, returned to his small town Indiana roots with stories like “The Kid Nobody Could Handle.”
Innocents Abroad and Roughing It are brilliant romps based on Mark Twain’s travels. But Twain’s soul remained in his childhood. Huckleberry Finn and the Adventures of Tom Sawyer couldn’t have been written if Mark hadn’t grown up in the Mississippi river port town of Hannibal, Missouri.
Ray Bradbury’s childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, lives on in many of his novels and short stories. Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine are filled with band stand concerts and drug store soda fountains. Even in futuristic stories or settings far from Earth, Bradbury still wrote about his boyhood. Science be damned, Bradbury lifted Waukegan and dropped it off on Mars for the Martian Chronicles.
Nostalgia doesn’t have to make sense.
That’s why I have craved Canadian winters lately. Part of me wants to return to Ottawa and bundle up in front of a warm fire while the latest blizzard rages outside. I have it good in Raleigh. Four seasons. Winters with maybe one or two snowfalls and temperatures that still allow me to run in January. Why would I want to return to snow flurries in October and darkness at four thirty in the dead of winter? Because the pull of those memories cannot be denied.
These hard-wired memories are like having videos you can rewind and reference over and over. They are great fodder for stories, because the little tidbits we remember—the cold wind in your face at the school bus stop or smell of your mom’s Chef Boyardee pizza—might resonate with readers as well. Those morsels have stuck around for a reason.
The good thing about personal nostalgia is that nobody is going to fact check you. Fuzzy memories are okay. Sure I might have one of those walk to school uphill in the snow both ways moments, but then again if I write about delivering newspapers at five p.m. in January in pitch blackness on iced-over streets, nobody is going to call me on it. I hope.
Shared nostalgia is trickier. The downside is that a lot of other people have the same experiences and they’ll point out missteps. The great thing is that you can tap into a well of collective memories. My story touches on two old science fiction series. A lot of folks have seen the original Star Trek. Not so with the Starlost. Harlan Ellison, a.k.a. Cornwainer Bird the supposed creator and writer, wishes fewer people had seen the quickly cancelled 1973 Canadian series. If you’re curious, all the episodes are on YouTube.
Sure I might have one of those walk to school uphill in the snow both ways moments, but then again if I write about delivering newspapers at five p.m. in January in pitch blackness on iced-over streets, nobody is going to call me on it. I hope.
Writers have to be careful with nostalgia. They can’t wallow in it. Glossing over bad memories and remembering the good is a great coping mechanism, but not ideal for world-building. Mark Twain observed, “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.””
Great personal memories don’t lead necessarily to great storytelling. I laugh about the good old days on monthly Zooms with my sister and cousins, but there’s a reason our partners don’t participate in those calls. They hope we get all of the family stories out of our systems before the next in-person meeting. We probably won’t.
There is no Camelot in the past. Every time has good and bad aspects. As kids, my brother and sister and I watched Happy Days. Growing up in 1950s Milwaukee looked ideal. My dad, who lived in Milwaukee in the 1950s, knew better. He didn’t spoil our fun despite the reality of the times. The Tv show never mentions Jim Crow or women’s rights or the threat of nuclear war. Hell, it never mentions Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin senator.
The best writing acknowledges the complexities of the past. Margaret Atwood didn’t just write about the great times she had at summer camp in the 1950s. She uses her memories to flesh out good and bad family complexities. Mark Twain didn’t write a Hardy Boys level children’s novel about hijinks on the Mississippi. He explored the dark side of the era and was not afraid to call out the evils of slavery and the hypocrisy of religion. The colonists who steamroll over Martian culture to recreate small town America in the Martian Chronicles ain’t the good guys.
My most nostalgia-infused story is probably “Searching for Commander Parsec” published by Asimov’s in September, 2015. A young boy hears impossible radio transmissions from a long canceled radio show. His mother investigates the source of the transmission. A reviewer said that I had copied the premise of “Jeffty is Five” by Harlan Ellison. I had never heard of the story but sought it out.
Ellison’s tale is a tour de force. Relying on his memories of old time 1940s radio, Ellison simultaneously sucks us in with inviting images of a simpler time before television when radio was king and kids tuned in every night to listen to the further adventures of radio serials. Then he pulls a bait and switch and the story turns into a cautionary fable about living in the past. Ellison has the same entrenched memories we all have, but he’s moved on and we should too.
From Earth to the Stars 
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