Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.
When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.