What are the places or landscapes that have imprinted upon you, or held you captive? How have you written yourself in, through, around, or away from, these places and landscapes?
I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, with the beautiful Snowy Range on the horizon, in a place of big skies, stunning clouds, and endless, honey-colored light. For a long time, I’ve held a strong belief that people are imprinted by landscape and place. Similarly, I believe that my life as a writer has been imprinted upon, shaped by, and filtered through landscape and place.
When I went away to college to study piano performance at Indiana University, I was initially enchanted by the rolling hills, the trees. There was so much green, everywhere. But after a while I began to feel closed in, claustrophobic. The humidity and the sky occluded by trees felt oppressive. I missed big skies and light, and the constant gray of Midwestern winters depressed me.
I’m someone who likes to be able to see things: the sky, the horizon line, predators rolling in from a distance. As a writer, I also like to be able to have that spaciousness of view. Even though I frequently deal in small, minute details, I always want to be able to see that larger context.
One of the things I realized about myself after leaving Wyoming is that I think more clearly when I can see the sky. I feel like my consciousness expands into all of that space and I can actually hear my own thoughts, my self’s self, speaking to me. That I need the openness, the space, and height, in order to achieve a kind of artistic clarity.
And the clouds! Those shape shifters. Those transformers. I’ve always been in love with them. Their ephemerality, their plasticity, in tandem with their gravitas, mass, and heft, have suggested to me not only the ways that substance and dream are never mutually incompatible, but they have also acted as a kind of masterclass in the possibilities of form and content. And a semaphore for how process, including my own writing process, can be grounded and stable, but also take on many shapes and forms over the course of an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year.
The scale of everything, of course, in the American West is inspiring. The infinite dome of sky. The slow drift of Leviathan-like clouds. The vastness of the mountains, with their vertiginous dropoffs. Even the sense of trespass I feel at the peaks where clouds malinger like mumbling ghosts, sometimes sharpening into a cool stinging mist. It is humbling. I feel humbled by the immensity of the mountains. Small in comparison. Inconsequential. A blip in geologic time. And this sharpens my senses, my curiosity, my desire. This makes me feel present in the moment. And because I can palpably feel how, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t really matter—which isn’t to say that I’m not valuable, or worthy, just tiny—I find all of this incredibly liberating, incredibly freeing, both as a person, and as a writer.
There is also the constant sound of the wind. Wind as idee fixe, as basso continuo, as theme and variations. Sometimes buffeting against the house in unrelenting gusts, sometimes stirring the limbs of the Nanking Cherry trees so they scratch and strum against the metal mesh window screens. In winter, the wind crescendoes until it’s sometimes a whistling, sometimes a keening, sometimes an eerie screeching. It is unnerving, yes, but also creates a clear sense of the demarcation between exterior and interior. The exterior feels uneasy-making, but also a little bit thrilling, and I experience gratitude for the shelter and solitude of the interior. But also, the wind inscribes something into my psyche that effects my language, my music, my expression—part howl, part song.
For a long time, I resisted this sense of place as foundation, as formative muse. When I left Laramie, I imagined myself leaving forever, and never turning back. In retrospect, what I think I was shedding, or shaking off, was a volatile and emotionally abusive home life, and a community in which, as a child, it felt difficult to be different/other. It took years for me to separate this violence, this heartbreak, from the breathtakingly beautiful landscape.
Because I’d been raised to think I was fundamentally “wrong,” that I was never enough, that I was unlovable, I was always on a mission to slough off my old selves, like Sylvia Plath’s “old whore petticoats.” To transform myself into becoming someone else entirely. Someone completely different, someone who lived somewhere, anywhere else. My mother used to tell me that because I was born in the year of the snake, I spoke with a forked tongue. By this, she meant that as far as she was concerned, everything I said was a lie. Instead, I think it meant that I was someone who was always desperately trying to shed her old skins.
In the ending of my poem “Happy Hour,” from my book Year of the Snake, I once wrote:
Sometimes a meadowlark would lace
the night air with
its elaborate melody,
rippling and sleek
as a black satin ribbon. Some-
times there would be
a falling star. And because
this happened in
Wyoming, and because this was
at any time, I always wished
that I was some-
where, anywhere else, but here.
my parents’ house,
and because I’m never happy
with anything,
I think I was pointing toward this restlessness, this incessant desire for transformation. For many years, I kept moving, again and again—a Goldilocks of place and apartments, trying to find a shell that was “just right,” that felt like home. It took me such a long time to realize, though, that I wasn’t trying to shed a place so much as I was trying to shed sadness, to leave behind a self that felt fundamentally “wrong,” never enough, unlovable.
Decades later, when I returned to Wyoming and became legal guardian to my parents, who were in cognitive decline, I was finally able to begin separating this mistaken sense of self from place, and I found myself recognizing a self who’d been terribly homesick for the vast blue skies, clouds, the golden light, the Snowy Range glinting on the cusp of the horizon.
To return to this familiarity of place, was also to reconnect, and to engage in an act of writerly and personal revision, of how I viewed and understood myself. Landscape and place functioned as a yardstick, by which I could measure a self who was both transformed and the same. Here, I could re-mother a self, and revise a constricting and fraught narrative imposed upon a child—I could slough off what itched and constricted and no longer fit, and glide away on the page into honeyed light, finally home and finally free.
I think I was pointing toward this restlessness, this incessant desire for transformation. For many years, I kept moving, again and again—a Goldilocks of place and apartments, trying to find a shell that was “just right,” that felt like home. It took me such a long time to realize, though, that I wasn’t trying to shed a place so much as I was trying to shed sadness, to leave behind a self that felt fundamentally “wrong,” never enough, unlovable.
Decades later, when I returned to Wyoming and became legal guardian to my parents, who were in cognitive decline, I was finally able to begin separating this mistaken sense of self from place, and I found myself recognizing a self who’d been terribly homesick for the vast blue skies, clouds, the golden light, the Snowy Range glinting on the cusp of the horizon.
To return to this familiarity of place, was also to reconnect, and to engage in an act of writerly and personal revision, of how I viewed and understood myself. Landscape and place functioned as a yardstick, by which I could measure a self who was both transformed and the same. Here, I could re-mother a self, and revise a constricting and fraught narrative imposed upon a child—I could slough off what itched and constricted and no longer fit, and glide away on the page into honeyed light, finally home and finally free.
***
Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei writer and the author of five poetry collections, including tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, a New York Public Library “Best Book of 2019” and Lambda Literary Award finalist. Their award‑winning work spans poetry, fiction, and lyric essays—most recently unMothered, unTongued (2025)—and appears widely in leading literary journals. Roripaugh is also the co‑editor of the forthcoming Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay and has been recognized with honors from the National Poetry Series and the Association of Asian American Studies.