about this author

How the West Won Out

Two years ago, while making the rounds on a book tour, promoting my collection of short stories, I was asked by a Bay Area radio interviewer to classify myself: Southern Writer or Western Writer? Had my chosen home finally superseded my birthplace in terms of influence? At this semi-advanced stage of the game, did I feel more Californian than North Carolinian?

I fear I stuttered. I believe I followed that flub with an equally inarticulate mumble. (Can’t bear to listen to the tape to confirm that suspicion.) In any case, I did not, on the spot and in the hot seat, produce an answer that clarified my allegiance, satisfied the interviewer, informed the listening public or, more to the point, enlightened me.

Where, exactly, did my writer’s head and heart lie?

The majority of authors, regardless of origin, will argue their status as writers (generic) first, insisting on membership in that broader club before discussing applicable subsets, including demarcations of birthplace and subject matter. In the fiction realm, this stance makes absolute sense. Fiction writing is, after all, imaginative writing and imaginative writing demands roaming rights, the capacity to birddog a character and track a narrative wherever either leads: north, south, east or west. Even if a novel’s town shares the name of a USGS verified locale, the first is the product of invention. It must be. To serve the cause of fiction.

Since my fiction was the writing under consideration, I could have echoed that argument. Less rattled, I would have done so—which might have saved the interview. But there was still the internal nag: self to self, true or false: had the clatter of palms edged out the fragrance of magnolia on my preference list? Had stark Mojave beauty replaced the Dismal Swamp’s viney attractions? Had earthquake terror supplanted hurricane dread?

In an attempt to find out, I went to my files and started sorting. The Southern pile captured an early lead but the Western pile gained steadily: short stories inspired by the Salton Sea, the Pacific Coast Highway south of Big Sur, a Los Gatos oleander patch. Essays on Death Valley, North Hollywood, Joshua Tree bouldering, the Roy Rogers Museum, the gift shop inventory at Mission San Juan Bautista. Copious notes for planned stories and essays on matrimony, Las Vegas-style, Route 66 billboards, Albuquerque’s Atomic Energy Museum, Yosemite stone, Bakersfield dust, Point Reyes surf. On paper, at least, the West had won out.

But it still took a while, even with a 950xx zip code, to break the habit of thinking and speaking in comparisons—Mendocino fog versus the mists of Provincetown, traffic snarls in San Diego versus Boston jam-ups—part of me still a tourist, or playing one. And then one day, for no reason I can absolutely pinpoint, a shift in reference and expectation. The region I’d previously considered home suddenly felt more alien, the once exotic West now more comfortably familiar.

In retrospect, it was a switch that came none too soon. To attempt a Silicon Valley tale of the future, I definitely needed to feel at home in my current time and space.