Chris Offutt and William Gay: Transforming Rural Life into Art

In my last blog, on Donald Ray Pollock, I cited a reviewer who compared Pollock to two other “country” blue-collar writers, Chris Offutt and William Gay. It occurred to me that some of my readers might not be familiar with Offutt and Gay. It also occurred to me that readers might think I came down hard on Pollock simply because he wrote about poor mountain people in a realistic fashion. That’s not true. I don't like Pollock’s work because I do not think he used the power of language to write about people with some depth and complexity and therefore transform them from merely “real” people (whatever that is) into literary figures who suggested significance and universal meaning, rather than just plain meanness. Although Offutt and Gay also write about uneducated and sometimes hard-edged rural folk, because they are much better writers than Pollock, one can identify and sympathize with their characters. So I thought I would post this blog on Offutt and Gay’s work to try to distinguish it from Pollock’s writing.

Chris Offutt

The stories in Chris Offutt's first book, the well-received 1992 Kentucky Straight, were so firmly situated in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky that, Faulkner-like, he included a map, with story locations labeled. In Out of the Woods, his second collection, he moved most of his characters out of the mountains, mainly to the wide-open spaces of the West. However, the Eastern Kentucky hill country remains a central force in these stories, for no matter where Offutt's mountain men go, the hills haunt them.

Out of the Wood’s title story, about a thirty-year old man who has never been out of the county, is the best. To secure his position with his new wife and her family, Gerald agrees to drive an old pickup two days to pick up his wife's brother who has been shot and is in a hospital in Wahoo, Nebraska. While this may seem like a simple task, for a mountain man it is fraught with unease; the land in Indiana and Illinois is as flat as a playing card with no place to hide, and at night the sky seems to press down on Gerald in a threatening way. When he arrives to find his brother-in-law has died, Gerald meets the woman who shot him--marveling at her purple hair, the gold ring in her nose, and the fact that it all happened over a dispute over a blond wig.

Gerald makes some common-sense arrangements and a few man-to-man deals with the authorities and heads back to Kentucky with his brother-in-law's body in the back of the pickup, stopping once to mound a pile of rich Illinois topsoil for his garden on the body. This homey traveling grave becomes comically grotesque when Gerald stops at a gas station and a dog starts to dig in the dirt; the smell is so bad a man thinks Gerald is taking a dead hog to the renderers. In this carefully controlled account of a simple man's homey, heroic management of an extraordinarily ordinary situation, Gerald's final gesture is to tell a public lie--that Ory was accidentally shot--for the sake of his in-laws.

"Melungeons," which appeared in the 1994 Best American Short Stories collection, is another mountain story, told in the same understated way with a similar stoically heroic character. Not as powerful as "Out of the Woods," but more popular because of its "exotic" multicultural context, "Melungeons" is, on the one hand, a variation of the oldest subtype of the Kentucky mountain story--the family feud, ala the Hatfields and McCoys. On the other hand, because it deals with the Melungeons, a small mixed-race (native-American, African-American, white) tribe that live in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee, it has a faddish appeal to the current literary craze for all things culturally marginal.

The focus of the story is on Deputy Ephraim Goins, who puts seventy-six-year-old Melungeon Haze Gibson in jail at his own request for his own protection. Gibson has left the mountains because of a family feud but now has returned because he has missed every wedding and funeral his family has ever had. Goins, also a Melungeon, has suffered racial prejudice, recalling being assigned to an all-black company when he was in the army when a dentist noticed his gums were tinged with blue. Scorned both by whites and blacks, Melungeons are thus doubly exiled and marginalized.

While Haze Gibson is one of the last of the older members of his family still alive, his nemesis, Beulah Mullins, one of the last old members of her clan, has heard he has returned. Never voted, never paid taxes, not off the mountain in fifty years, no record of her birth, Beulah makes the trip into town in answer to a bone-deep demand; over thirty people from the Mullins and the Gibson clans have died over the years in the feud that started sixty years before over disputed bear meat. She goes to the jail with a sawed-off shotgun hidden in her skirt, implacable in her duty, kills the last of the old Gibsons, and takes his place in the jail cell. Deputy Goins walks out of the jail and heads toward the nearest slope, having been called by this primitive ritual back to the hills from whence he came. The story is told in the restrained classical tones of mythic inevitability.

Chris Offutt understands and respects his characters. He does not exploit them as trendy exotics, nor does he revel in local color quaintness and meanness. Offutt is a carefully controlled craftsman who knows how to use language to reflect the essential humanness of his characters, an artist, transforming mere external reality into poetic meaning.

William Gay

Until a few years ago, William Gay, son of a sharecropper, was a fifty-five-year-old drywall hanger and carpenter working in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Now, without ever coming near an MFA program, he is one of those self-taught “overnight” successes (after piling up rejection slips for thirty years, receiving praise in The New York Times and The Washington Post from Tony Early and Madison Smartt Bell. How did that happen? The thirteen short stories in I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, three of which were selected three years in a row for New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, may provide some answers.

What Gay has mastered, through his reading of other authors and lots of hard work at his own writing, is a mesmerizing mixture of the jagged and the smooth, the untutored and the carefully studied. The result is an illusion of gritty reality made meaningful by a stylized lyrical voice and painstaking artistic control. What you get in these stories are men who are ornery, stubborn, foolish, a bit dangerous—but they have been sorely tempted or pushed too far, and all of a sudden they find themselves driven headlong out of the ordinary into the hallucinatory.

In the title story, old man Meecham has walked out of a rest home, declaring, “It’s a factory where they make dead folks, and I ain’t workin there no more.” All he has to do is to get those no account white trash house out of his house. It’s not going to be easy. In “Sugarbaby,” a man shoots his wife’s dog because its constant “yip, yip, yip” was driving him crazy. But then his wife leaves him, her lawyers get after him, he has to hit a deputy on the head and burn his squad car. Things just go down hill after that.

Gay’s stories are an intriguing mixture of delta blues and country music. “Crossroads Blues,” in which a man is haunted by the ghost of Robert Johnson and an old murder in his trailer, is followed by “Closure and Roadkill on the Life’s Highway,” in which a guy whose woman has dropped out of his life meets an old man who says he has buried twenty thousand dollars in a cave above the Tennessee River and needs help getting it out.

Many of these men get into a mess because of women, sometimes with horrifying results, as in “The Paperhanger,” in which a guy flirts with the teasing wife of a rich Pakistani doctor whose four-year-old daughter disappears, only to come back gruesomely; and sometimes with black comic effects, as in “The Man Who Knew Dylan,” in which a man tries to help out a woman who keeps her mean old daddy’s body in the freezer for a few months in order to continue getting his checks.

Readers may initially be drawn to Gay because of his “working man” persona, but they will stay with him for his artistic ability to invent characters who sound authentic, even though they are highly stylized, and to tell stories reeking of messy reality, even though they are tightly controlled artifices.

Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock, and a Smear on Appalachian People

Two years ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg entitled “A New American Voice” about Knockemstiff, a debut collection of stories by a new writer named Donald Ray Pollock. The article caught my eye not only because it was about a collection of short stories, which the WSJ seldom deigns to mention, but also because the author was 53, grew up in a small town in Appalachian southern Ohio, and went to school at Ohio University, my own graduate school alma mater. Early reviews compared Pollock to Eastern Kentucky writer Chris Offutt and Tennessee late bloomer William Gay, both favorite writers of mine and likened his book to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, one of the great American short story collections. However, being the parsimonious country boy that I am, I was not willing to shell out my twenty-something bucks for a hardback copy until I read at least one of the stories. I found the story “Real Life,” online.

The first couple of sentences go like this: “My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old. It was the only thing he was ever any good at.” O.K., I was up for that, but the first sentence of the second paragraph—“It was hotter than a fat lady’s box that evening”—let me know I was not in Winesburg. And it didn’t get any better. In this little family outing, the mother’s main talent is to shove a hotdog down her throat without messing up her lipstick. The father, concerned that drinking from a bottle would make a wino out of a man, drinks his whiskey from the car ashtray, butts and all. The real action begins when the father and son go to the concession-stand, and a man with arms the “size of fence posts” tells the father to watch his foul language around his son, a boy about the narrator’s size. When the father hits the big man, making the air “whoosh out of his body like a fart,” he encourages the narrator to beat up on the son as well. The story ends with the father bragging to the mother, “I bet a paycheck he broke that kid’s nose, the way the blood came out.” The narrator goes to bed licking the blood off his knuckles. “I tore at the skin with my teeth. I wanted more. I would always want more.”

Well, I didn’t; that was enough for me. I have always been a defender of everybody’s right to write about any horrible thing they want to, but there was such a grotesque absence of “redeeming social value” in the story that I really did not have the stomach for any more. I remember men and boys like the narrator and his father when I was growing up in Eastern Kentucky, but mostly at a distance. I had no desire to encounter them back then, and I had no wish to read about them in Pollock’s over-the-top stories.

So why did I recently buy Knockemstiff and read all eighteen stories? Three reasons: One, it was in paperback for about ten bucks on Amazon. Two, it was on the list of short story collections published in the last two years that I had not read and promised in an earlier blog that I would eventually get to. Three, you shouldn’t judge a man’s work based on only one encounter with it.

Knockemstiff is a page-turner, all right, but primarily because it is all action and little thought and because Pollock’s style is direct and well edited—in short, an easy visceral read. The people who live in the little hardscrabble hamlet of Knockemstiff (which is about eight or ten miles south of Chillicothe) snort Bactine out of paper bags, have sex with their siblings, eat nothing but fried bologna, cheese slices, and Krispie Kreme donuts, drink a lot of beer and cheap booze, run meth labs, get hooked on OxyContin, beat up their kids, masturbate with toy dolls and a mud dauber’s nest, and rape ”retards” (to use the language of the addicts, drunks, and lay-abouts that populate Knockemstiff).

I read the whole damn thing and then flung it across the room. This was not Winesburg; it was Tobacco Road. The folks of Winesburg have some emotional complexity. They are “grotesque,” as Anderson called them, because of their unfulfilled desires and their loneliness, not because they snort Bactine and rape their sisters. I did some research on Pollock and found the following:

Although the publishers of the paperback quote the Wall Street Journal as saying that Pollock “could be the next important voice in American fiction,” what the WSJ article actually said was: “Now some in the book world say he could be the next important voice in American fiction.” Well, I couldn’t find anybody in the book world who said that. The New York Times review by Jonathan Miles was thoughtful but restrained, concluding, “Pollock’s voice is fresh and full-throated, and while these stories travel negligible distances, even from one another, the best of them leave an indelible smear.” To my way of thinking, when you finish the book you may feel the smear leaves a bad smell. And if you are a poor boy from the mountains, you may resent being tarred with Pollock’s stinky brush.

There were more publicity-driven pieces about the author than reviews of the book. The fact that Pollock is a high school dropout, a recovering alcoholic, and a laboring man who went to college late in life and didn’t start writing until about eight years ago made what Doubleday’s marketing director called “a great publicity hook to go out with.” The fact that such a man was able to write at all made the yuppies in the New York publishing world ooh and ah. The fact that he wrote about disgusting people in a funny-named village in the Appalachian mountains made them shake their heads in condescending disgust and nod their heads in agreement that this stuff could sell.

The buzz about the book is all about marketing, about selling the man, not the fiction, about perpetuating a stereotype of a region and its people. There is no human complexity in Pollock’s characters, just mostly meanness. Some of the people in these stories long for a better life and have media-created dreams of what that life might be, but most are just too ignorant to give a damn about anything but immediate simplistic, ugly pleasures. The problem is, too many readers, especially those who remember Deliverance, will assume that everyone in the Appalachian mountains are like the no-accounts in Knockemstiff. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again. Mountain folk are the last cultural minority who must suffer simplistic stereotypes.

It was a serendipitous coincidence that while I was reading Pollock’s book, my wife brought me the March issue of Smithsonian, which featured an article about the Eastern Kentucky photographer Shelby Lee Adams, with a copy of his famous 1990 photograph Home Funeral. (See attached). The author of the article, Abigail Tucker, interviewed the grown-up woman, nicknamed Nay Bug, who is the little girl standing by the coffin in the picture.

Tucker notes that some critics say that Shelby Lee Adams is exploiting a region “already saddled with stereotypes involving poverty and violence.” Adams responds that he is capturing a fading culture and that as bleak as his photographs may be, “Within the shadows lie the depth and beauty of human beings…. Until we understand our own darkness, we won’t understand our beauty.” Perhaps that is true. I am certainly not trying to deny the effects of poverty on the people from the region I am proud to call home. I recognize those honest and hard-working I am happy to call “my people” in many of Adams’ photograph. You can see them yourselves on his website.

But I see no beauty in the darkness of Donald Ray Pollock’s stories. I would defend his right to write about the self-indulgent junkies of Knockemstiff. But I want nothing to do with them. It takes a very fine writer with a miraculous style to transform the sad and lonely people of rural Russia, Dublin Ireland, or Winesburg, Ohio into characters of depth and complexity. Donald Ray Pollock is no Turgenev, James Joyce, or Sherwood Anderson. He has created a lineup of ignorant irredeemables who are what my mother would call “trashy”-- “mean as snakes” and “orney as polecats.”

Regionalism, Local Color, Kentucky Writing, Gurney Norman as Poet Laureate

Jeff Birkenstein, one of my students from years back who got his Ph.D. in lit from University of Kentucky, just sent me an email with the good news that Gurney Norman has been appointed Poet Laureate of Kentucky.

I have known Gurney’s work for years, but had never met him until last June when we both wound up as speakers at the International Short Story Conference in Cork. Gurney was there to talk about his experience as a student of Frank O’Connor when he was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, while I was there to talk about O’Connor’s theory of the short story in his wonderful little book The Lonely Voice

I was sicker than a dog with some terrible lung infection that made me cough so much that I had to turn down an invitation to sit at Edna O’Brien’s table at the conference banquet. Instead, I stayed in my room coughing so much I thought I would die. (This is the point where you are supposed to feel sorry for the old feller) So I was not very good company when Gurney and I had lunch together one day and talked about growing up in Eastern Kentucky.

Gurney grew up in Hazard, Ketucky, which is only about an hour’s drive up the river toward Virginia from my hometown of Paintsville. He got his journalism degree at University of Kentucky in 1959, just a year before I graduated from high school and went to Morehead State College for my undergraduate degree. Gurney was friends with Bobbie Ann Mason, Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, and other Kentucky writers while at U.K. Two of his professors there were Robert Hazel and Hollis Summers.

I met Robert Hazel in the summer of 1960 when I attended a Writer’s Workshop at Morehead, put together by Albert Stewart. Al got me a scholarship to the Workshop, where I got an award as “Most Promising Fiction Writer.” (This is the point when you are supposed to chuckle at the boy) Hot damn! Heavy stuff for a country boy right out of high school. Hollis Summers was one of my favorite teachers a few years later when I was a graduate student at Ohio University. He taught a seminar called “Stylistics” and taught me the value of placing just the right word in just the right place. (Forgive me, Hollis, if I do not always make you proud.) It surely is a small, small world in the tristate area of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio.

While I was at Ohio, Gurney was at Stanford, studying under O’Connor, Wallace Stegner, and Malcolm Cowley. After a stint in the army, Gurney was a newspaper reporter in Hazard, Ky., before going back to Palo Alto in 1967 to work with Stewart Brand on the Whole Earth Catalog. His best known novel, Divine Right’s Trip, was originally published in The Last Whole Earth Catalog and then later by Dial.

Gurney’s wonderful little collection of short stories, Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories was published in 1977. He then became a teacher in the University of Kentucky creative writing program, later becoming its Director. He is still a powerful force at UK and indeed all over the state.

When I heard about his appointment as Poet Laureate, I got out my copy of Kinfolks, which my brother, who lives in Kentucky, sent me several years ago. It’s still in print. I encourage you to order your own copy from Amazon. The central character, Wilgus, grows up in the mountains and does the best he can to manage the unpredictable behavior of his kinfolks: grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and family friends. It is one of the most honest books about the folks of Appalachia that I have ever read. Gurney is a great defender of the integrity of Eastern Kentucky people. Like me, he will not tolerate anyone making fun of “hillbillies.”

While I am feeling homesick for the mountains, I will impose upon you some other recommendations about Kentucky writers. By far, the best single volume of short stories by Kentucky writers is Home and Beyond, edited by an old friend of mine, Morris Grubbs. Published by the University of Kentucky Press in 2001, it includes some of the very best stories by writers from my home state from the 1940s right up to the year 2000. In addition to the widely known Robert Penn Warren, Caroline Gordon, Jesse Stuart, Bobbie Ann Mason, Wendell Berry, and Barbara Kingsolver, there are wonderful stories by James Still, Billy C. Clark, Hollis Summers, David Madden, Jim Wayne Miller, Richard Day, Guy Davenport, Chris Holbrook, and Chris Offutt. One of Gurney Norman’s best stories, “Maxine,” is also included. It’s still in print. As someone who is interested in good short fiction, you will find’s God’s plenty here.

James Still is the quintessential example of how the writing in this book is both regional and universal at once. For although he has the language of the people of the mountains of Eastern Kentucky "down to a T" and although he knows their customs intimately as an insider, readers who find such regional particularity the main merit of his fiction miss what makes him great. It is Still's ability, without the slightest hint of sentimentality, to magically transform fascinating difference into sympathetic sameness and thus make Nezzie Hargis in "The Nest" break our hearts trying to be "a little woman." There is no "local color" here, no "marginality," no "exoticism," no "social significance"--just pure narrative that is real and transcendent at once.

For those of you who do not know the work of James Still, please let me recommend him highly. James Still was 94 when he died in April, 2001 in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, where he had lived, mostly alone, for over sixty years in a small log cabin on a branch of Little Carr Creek in Knott County.

A writer's writer, never widely read, he was, however, respected and praised by such peers as Katherine Ann Porter, James Dickey, Cleanth Brooks, Marjorie Kinnman Rawlings, and many others. Gurney Norman, Kentucky writer and director of the University of Kentucky creative writing program, called Still the "most influential Kentucky writer of the last 50 years," the parent of all Kentucky writers who came after 1940.

Although Still is best known for his classic novel of the struggles of a coal-mining family in Eastern Kentucky, River of Earth (1940), and his short-story collection, On Troublesome Creek (1941), many critics believe that in his precise and lyrical use of language, he is primarily a poet. When his collection The Wolfpen Poems was published in 1986, James Dickey said the book established Still as the "truest and most remarkable poet that the mountain culture has produced."

Wade Hall, emeritus professor, and a leading authority on Kentucky literature, has said that no one had ever captured Southern Appalachian folk life better than Still. "He was basically a poet," said Hall, with an economy of words that lifted his prose to the level of poetry. This is a view shared by, among many others, Wendell Berry, one of Still's former students, who says Still gives his prose the economy, liveliness, and density of poetry.

Jim Still was one of my teachers at Morehead State back in the early sixties. He introduced me to Gogol, Chekhov, and Turgenev. I was fortunate enough to pay him a visit in 2001 in the Hospital in Hazard, just two days before he died. I wrote a tribute to him in Appalachian Heritage.

The critical issue I would like to raise with this blog posting concerns so-called “local color” or ”regionalism.” I quote below a brief excerpt from an interview I did with a very fine contemporary Kentucky writer a few years ago: Chris Offutt, who teaches in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

May: Flannery O'Connor once said: "The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great fear of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them." Do you feel that way?

Offutt: I have never had anybody call me a regional writer. Is Philip Roth a regional writer because he writes about New York? Is James Welch a regional writer because he writes about Montana? Is Flannery O'Connor a regional writer? Is William Faulkner? I think we are beyond those terms. Those were earlier distinctions, when the term "regional writer" essentially meant a second-class writer. By that I mean, writers who were unable in the sophistication of their work to get beyond their immediate surroundings. And there are many, many writers like that all over the country. I don't know what it is related to. It is not related to intelligence or ambition. Flannery O'Connor rarely left her state. Eudora Welty still lives in the house she grew up in. So it's not about leaving. Maybe it is about depth of the writing itself. When I write, I write to be remembered. I write for the masters of literature, not for the region.”

The stories in Chris Offutt's first book, the well-received 1992 Kentucky Straight, were so firmly situated in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky that, Faulkner-like, he included a map, with story locations labeled. In this, his second collection, he has moved most of his characters out of the mountains, mainly to the wide-open spaces of the West. However, the Eastern Kentucky hill country remains a central force in these stories, for no matter where Offutt's mountain men go, the hills haunt them.

His second collection, Out of the Woods is richly flavored with Appalachia, not by local color descriptions, sentimental nostalgia, corny dialect, or trendy marginalized social context, but by characters who think and sound genuine.

The collection's title story, about a thirty-year old man who has never been out of the county, is the best. To secure his position with his new wife and her family, Gerald agrees to drive an old pickup two days to pick up his wife's brother who has been shot and is in a hospital in Wahoo, Nebraska. While this may seem like a simple task, for a mountain man it is fraught with unease; the land in Indiana and Illinois is as flat as a playing card with no place to hide, and at night the sky seems to press down on Gerald in a threatening way. When he arrives to find his brother-in-law has died, Gerald meets the woman who shot him--marveling at her purple hair, the gold ring in her nose, and the fact that it all happened over a dispute over a blond wig.

Gerald makes some common-sense arrangements and a few man-to-man deals with the authorities and heads back to Kentucky with his brother-in-law's body in the back of the pickup, stopping once to mound a pile of rich Illinois topsoil for his garden on the body. This homey traveling grave becomes comically grotesque when Gerald stops at a gas station and a dog starts to dig in the dirt; the smell is so bad a man thinks Gerald is taking a dead hog to the renderers. In this carefully controlled account of a simple man's homey, heroic management of an extraordinarily ordinary situation, Gerald's final gesture is to tell a public lie--that Ory was accidentally shot--for the sake of his in-laws.

Chris Offutt is the first fiction writer since James Still to accurately capture the life of the people of the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Like Still, he understands and respects his characters. He does not exploit them as trendy exotics, nor does he revel in local color quaintness. Offutt is not a modish socialist with a multicultural message about marginality, but a carefully controlled craftsman who knows how to use language to reflect the essential humanness of his characters. He is not a sociologist playing back a tape recording or illustrating abstractions, but an artist, transforming mere external reality into poetic meaning.

Here is another excerpt from my interview with Offutt:

May: It seems to me that some people who have no idea about the people who live in Appalachia still make judgments about what they call ignorant, red necked, hillbillies. I've been called redneck. Have you ever been called redneck?

Offutt: Oh, yeah, and I don't like it. I feel sometimes like I am a one-man political action group trying to let people know that words like "hillbilly" and "redneck" are very painful. They are on par with any other racial epithet. A lot of people don't understand that. "Redneck" is exclusive to rural, white, poor people, usually men, and a tremendous amount of stereotyped behavior goes along with it. It is always a negative term. There is no equivalent term for rural poor people, for example, in Connecticut. It is almost always Southern. A lot of big city newspapers in the North will use terms like "redneck" and "hillbilly," whereas they would never use hurtful equivalent terms for various racial groups or religious groups.

May: I agree completely; I just wanted you to say it for the record.

Offutt: It pisses me off. I never allow it to happen. Somebody recently gave me a tape of country western music on which they had written in pen, "screaming hillbillies." I tried to explain that a person like me does not think "hillbilly" is a very nice word.

May: White rural Appalachians are perhaps one of the last cultural minority groups in American that it is still quite acceptable to make fun of.

Offutt: That's right, and it's just too bad.

One of the most basic problems about stories largely centered on place is the danger of the dreaded label of "local color" or "regionalism." In a little book called Kentucky Story that my old teacher Al Stewart gave me forty years ago, the editor James McConkey felt he had to remind readers that it was the "manner" of the writing, not merely the "matter" that was important, insisting that the regional details in the stories were used in such a way "that a greater understanding in gained of the universal human spirit." Hollis Summers, in his introduction to Kentucky Stories, published at about the same time (1954), also noted that what was at stake was the artist's "what" and "how," not the sociologist's "why" and "where." To my mind stories should be read, as Hollis Summers said of the fictions in Kentucky Story, not as regional artifacts, but as "stories, succeeding or failing on their own merits."

What do you think? Every writer has to situate his or her work in some particular place? What is it about being specific about “place” that might place a writer in the category of “regionalist”? What are your thoughts about “local color?” How does a writer transcend such labels? Or should one try to transcend such labels? I appreciate your feedback.