Place Where

So there I am today, listening to Bruce, as I do most days, and I got to thinking how much New Jersey permeates his music. I was thinking how interesting it is that an artist can be so deeply tied to a place, and yet be famous everywhere. Think of Stephen King and Maine. Harvey Pekar or Drew Carey and Cleveland.

I found it interesting to learn that Willa Cather, though she did grow up in Nebraska, wasn't born there, nor did she spend most of her life there. She moved from Nebraska to Pittsburgh after she finished college, then from Pittsburgh to New York, where she lived out the rest of her life. Her name is so closely linked to Nebraska that one can barely think of one without thinking of the other, but she only spent a small portion of her life there.

This has been on my mind, I guess, since I started trying to write fiction. Everything I write insists on being set in Cleveland. I spent so much of my life trying to escape Cleveland, and apparently my muse wasn't so eager to leave.