Barrie Jean Borich has two truly telling tattoos.
On her back, she has art of two cities, which she writes about in the opening of her 2013 book, Body Geographic. On her right arm, she has the tattoo of work from artist Ariel Cafarelli in Minneapolis translating one of the maps from the book into body art.
The map is called Meandering Mississippi and is from an Army Corp of Engineers chart of the changing paths of the Mississippi River. A portion of this map is included in the book, in a chapter about New Orleans, and the Mississippi is the major waterfront of Minneapolis, "so [it] has a special significance for me, both in terms of geography and in regards to the way the image conveys the experience of living through change," she said.
Borich, 54, lives in Chicago, and is, she said, "unlegally married" to Linnea Stenson, 53, the dean of a community college in Minneapolis who is moving to Chicago in December. Borich also is a professor at DePaul University.
Body Geographic, released this past March, is a 272-page journey, divided into 14 chapters plus narrative notes. The chapters—some of them called Maps, some called Triptiks, some "Unmapped" passages of transition and remaking— come together to evoke the experience of reading an atlas that has been immersed in personal experience and memory, she said.
"I'm interested in the way our lives are part of the history of places and the ways places hold the stories of migrations and longings of people, so the book is a kind of personal atlas about the idea of locating the self and making sense of a life as seen through a geographical lens," Borich said. "Some theorists describe the sort of thing I'm up to in this book as a 'deep map,' meaning, a description of place that includes history, memory, testimony, observation, politics, poetics and anything else one might say about the definition of a place."
For Borich, her places are Midwestern cities, and her relationship to these cities is part-identity and part-migration stories. "I tried, in writing this book, to explore the echoes between my grandparents' and great grandparents' emigration from Croatia, Bohemia and Poland to the steel mill regions of Chicago and my own queer migration from Chicago to Minneapolis," she said. "I'm interested in the ways queer bodies are themselves a kind of map of desire, longing and reinvention, making us, in some ways, the most American of Americans."
Borich said one of her personal favorite parts of the book is the chapter called "Cities of Possibility" about walking Minneapolis at night years ago and her friendship with a young gay man named Scott. "Although it's one of the more difficult parts of the story I had to tell, I am partial to the chapter called 'City in the Middle,' about the year my spouse and I were faced with issues of mortality, events that significantly remapped us both."
Borich started writing and researching Body Geographic about 12 years ago. The book was in production at University of Nebraska for about 18 months. And so far many of the book's reviews have been positive.
"I received an email to my website this past summer from a distant cousin, the son of my father's uncle, who is now a fine arts painter in Cincinnati and I had never met him," Borich said. "He wrote me to share his attentive and artful responses to the book, not only the themes and stories but also, as he put it, that 'some of your relatives are my relatives.'
"I love the way publishing books has helped me make these surprising connections with parts of my family, and thus my family history, I would have otherwise never known existed."
Borich teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level creative writing and in the new MA in Writing and Publishing Program. "I've only been at DePaul for a year, so I'll probably have much more to say about the culture a bit down the road, but so far I've found the institution supportive, welcoming, and queer-friendly," she said. "I'm currently working on developing a course on literary journals, have just been named the faculty advisor for the student literary magazine, and am working on starting up a new national literary journal with an urban environmental focus."
Borich's work nowadays on Chicago's North Side is a contrast with her South Side upbringing. She was raised in Riverdale and attended high school in South Holland. "This was [during] the 1960s and '70s, when the steel mills were still open, so most of the people I grew up with came from families with some connections to the mills," she said. "My parents were public school teachers in the near South suburbs, but my grandmother didn't move out of her apartment in South Deering until close to the end of her life, and our cousins lived in Beverly, so we traveled frequently back and forth across the South Side city line. We were smart-mouthed, hard-partying, cynical kids, accustomed to gritty industrial landscapes. Where I live now, at the edge of Boystown near the lake, was unknown to me until I was in college and started looking for queer culture in the city."
Body Geographic is, without question, a queer book, she said. "It's a queerly structured [book that] makes queer associations and embraces queerness as a 'normal' American identity," Borich said. "The book is not a coming-out story, but also does not assume that heterosexuals own American culture. When I sold the book to the University of Nebraska American Lives series—which features all manner of American memoirs, many of them place-based—I argued that the queer story is as American as any other American story, perhaps even more so because of all the ways the very American concept of reinvention is the special province of American queers. It's a book that rises out of a life lived in the LGBT world, from a quarter century lived in a self-defined lesbian marriage, but which also examines the ways historical, geographical, and corporeal intersections are the stuff of all our American stories."
More from Barrie Jean Borich:
—About her book My Lesbian Husband: "I wrote My Lesbian Husband in a time very different than the one we live in now, before most of us imagined same-sex marriage would ever be legalized in our lifetime." The book was first published in 1999, but was just re-released by Graywolf Press as an e-book, with a new preface, updating the marriage debates.
"My Lesbian Husband is not so much an argument for what we call today 'marriage equality,' but rather, a book-length essay/memoir exploring, from a lesbian point of view, whether the concept of marriage is one my beloved and I want to apply to our long love affair. At the same time, the book's subtitle is 'Landscapes of a Marriage' and the project also explores the relationship of home to the ways our relationship has been seen and understood by family and community during the course of our lives together. So much has changed since I wrote that book, but it's still the only lesbian memoir I know of that interrogates the concept of marriage from a feminist perspective, looking at the question personally, both pro and con, and all the way through asking the question 'Are we married?'"
—One of her favorite and least favorite destinations: "I love and believe in cities. All cities fascinate and enthrall me, though I'm particularly interested in cities that have embraced bicycle transit and green city planning. I love ocean fronts, but otherwise I'm a city girl and prefer built landscapes to open spaces, unless the natural landscape is dramatic and difficult, such as the High Sierras or the Mediterranean Coast."
—About her relationship: "Linnea and I most frequently refer to each other as 'spouse.' I don't mind 'wife' for myself, but it doesn't work for her; she's far too butch. We had a wedding in Las Vegas 15 years ago, before it was legal anywhere in the states, but haven't decided yet, [even] after 26 years together if we will take advantage of the new marriage laws, or if we will keep our status old-school."©For more about Borich and Body Geographic, and to see her Meandering Mississippi tattoo in progress, go to www.barriejeanborich.com .
