A Place to Call Home

Fanfiction
Title:	A Place to Call Home
Author(s):	Chris Hoch
Date(s):	1993
Length:
Genre(s):	slash
Fandom(s):	Star Trek: TOS
Relationship(s):	Kirk/Spock
External Links:
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A Place to Call Home is a Kirk/Spock story by Chris Hoch.

It was published in Charisma #18.

Summary

"Spock accompanies Kirk back to his home for a week so Kirk can decide whether to keep or sell the farm."

Reactions and Reviews

1994

This new writer has done a fine job with this delicate tale of Spock accompanying Kirk to his farm home in Iowa. They talk about their childhoods, build snowmen and go ice skating. The story has lots of feeling and warmth and their connection of shared memories leads them to make love.

I'm so glad this author understands Kirk enough to know that he is not driven to senle down at home. "Yes, this had been wonderful, but it wasn't the life for a man like James T. Kirk." arid "Home for him would always be the Enterprise."

Very good ending in that home is wherever they are together.

1997: One of Three Stories With the Same Theme

Stories in which Spock goes home with Kirk to Iowa seem to be much less common in K/S than stories in which Kirk goes home with Spock to Vulcan. These three stories are a sample of a relatively small body of K/S stories set in Iowa.

In each of these three stories, Kirk invites Spock to visit his boyhood home, and the result is a turning point in their relationship. Two are classic "first-time" stories, and in the third, the visit leads to a relationship of greater intimacy and commitment. (The "Kirk brings his life partner home to Mother" story is a different type of K/S tale and probably deserves a thematic review of its own.)

"Home" can mean the place we come back to, the place where our roots grow; or, it can mean the place we forsake, the place we must leave in order to begin our lives in earnest. In K/S, "home" has come to have different meanings for Kirk and Spock respectively. For Spock, Vulcan often means "home" in a sense that is at best ambiguous, at worst bitter and alienated. We tend to see Spock as at home only in Starfleet or with Kirk. By contrast, Iowa as Kirk's "home" seems much less problematic.

In "A Place to Call Home," this contrast is clear and explicit. The story takes place after Kirk's mother's death; Kirk has invited Spock to spend a week with him at his now-vacant boyhood home while he decides whether to sell the farm. The house, and the story, are suffused with Kirk's memories of his happy childhood. In contrast the memories of home that Spock shares with Kirk are mostly negative. At one point in the story Spock says to Kirk, "I do not find that [home] brings me the same sense of fondness and nostalgia that it seems to bring you. On the contrary, it makes me extremely thankful that I was given the opportunity to leave." Although "The Picnic" does not tell us how Spock feels about his home on Vulcan, it is clear that Kirk enjoys visiting his old town and reveling in old memories.

The image of Kirk's home town in both "A Place to Call Home" and "The Picnic" is romantic and nostalgic. It's a place where people farm, fish, go on picnics, make a snow man, go ice-skating, eat huge breakfasts and drink hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire. It's an idealized image of the small-town American "heartland" that is rooted deeply in our national lore and myth. Indeed, in "The Picnic," Kirk and his neighbors are shown celebrating their town's centennial. In a story line reminiscent of Oklahoma! Kirk's mother makes a box supper so that Spock can bid on it and win an evening with Kirk.

The nostalgic images in these stories affected me deeply, perhaps because I come from a small town in the upper Midwest myself. But regardless of the associations the reader brings to these stories, I think the clarity of the writing in "A Place to Call Home" would make anyone feel at home in the Kirk farmhouse. The author makes us see the spacious, comfortable rooms, feel the warmth of the fire and the stillness of a deep snowfall, smell the breakfast cooking and taste the hot chocolate. The actual details of farm and small town life are rasher hazy. In both stories, Kirk's mother is, or was, a research scientist, and Kirk's father has been dead for some time. It's not clear who actually farms the land, but I don't think it really matters. "Iowa" in these stories is such a powerful symbol of home, family and all-American virtues that social realism is at the very least a secondary value.

What is the function of "Iowa" in K/S stories? To judge by "A Place to Call Home" and "The Picnic," it is a place where the two men can relax, "be at home," and cast off the roles and inhibitions of their Starfleet identities. It's a place where both men—not just Kirk—can "come home" in the sense of returning to bedrock, to essential truths, to their real feelings about each other. In "A Place to Call Home," Kirk and Spock spend their week together relaxing, talking, revealing more and more of themselves growing closer. In "The Picnic," Spock is initially reluctant to go home with Kirk to participate in the small-town centennial festivities, but loses his inhibitions and gets so into the spirit of the events that he astonishes Kirk. Both stories are written mostly from 's point of view (though it was not always clear who was telling the story, and I felt the treatment of point of view could have been improved in both stories), which is appropriate since it is Spock who does most of the loosening up in both stories. It is interesting that in "A Place to Call Home," Kirk and Spock grow closer as a result of being alone together—romantically snowed in for much of the time— while in "The Picnic," the barriers to a romantic relationship fall as a result of their participation in the typical small-town communal activities of a bygone era. Perhaps the common denominator is that in both stories, being at home in Iowa seems to give the two men permission to get in touch with a part of themselves that is artless, simple, natural and unsophisticated. The results, of course, are satisfying for all.

[snipped: comments about Miles to Go.]