If I could have gone on describing to you the beauties of this region, who knows but I might have made a fine addition to the literature of our age?
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I write about my region, the countryside in which I grew up.
I definitely don't think of myself as someone identified by region. It's too far-flung a region, for starters, and southern New Mexico is very isolated. I wouldn't think of my identity as generational, either, but maybe as more stylistic, in the school of realism and domestic issues.
I grew up in Ditchling. It was an idyllic village at the foot of the South Downs. In those days, the village was full of artists and sculptors.
The valley we lived in could easily be the setting for a fantasy novel or a prairie western novel. It could be anything.
We share a wonderful, I think, physical or geographical heritage.
Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!
I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers.
Seven of my novels take place in the Southwest, in the Four Corners area which has been my home since 1973. I know these mountains, rivers, mesas and canyons well, so it's been natural for me to draw on my own personal experiences here.
I wrote my senior essay on the Santa Fe Writer's Colony and my dissertation on sacred landscapes - the Grand Canyon, the Dakota Badlands. As a setting, I love the West. I just love that western landscape.
I'm from northern Virginia, but I grew up next to the West Virginia border, so it was hills and farmland. We had that sense of adventure you get from growing up around old farmhouses and lazy, rolling hills, you know?
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