"It may be that place can focus the gigantic, voracious eye of genius and bring its gaze to point. Focus then means awareness, discernment, order, clarity, insight -- they are like the attributes of love. The act of focusing itself has beauty and meaning; it is the act that continued in, turns into meditation, into poetry. Indeed, as soon as the least of us stands still, that is the moment something extraordinary is seen to be going on in the world."and
"Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course. These charges need the warm hard earth underfoot, the light and lift of air, the stir and play of mood, the softening bath of atmosphere that give the likeness-to-life that life needs. Through the story's translation and ordering of life, the unconvincing raw material becomes the very heart's familiar. Life is strange. Stories hardly make it more so; with all they are able to tell and surmise, they make it more believable, more inevitably so."But sometimes, especially after long interstate drives past the same restaurants and billboards, I am afraid that places are losing their identities, paving over paradise, etc.
Then again, what place but the Gulf Coast would put a Walmart, Waffle House and Shell Stations on beachfront property?
