CR: Most ofyour stories novels seem to bit with the idea of"place"_,,...,,, ... r•r•n South. are your thoughts on how "place" functions in a or how in your fiction both literally MP: Most ofmy stories and novels are set in or around eastern North Carolina, where I grew up. I know the landscape there, I know what it smells like when rain blows up from the coast, I know what it sounds like to be in a tobacco barn when that rain finally arrives, though I haven't lived there in over 30 years. I don't have to invent it from the ground up, though my rendition of it is always metaphori– cal, never realistic; for landscape in fiction is emotion, and my job is not to convince someone that I'm a native of eastern North Carolina, but to use, say, that point where a field tucks down into a pine grove as a means to suggest something about what's going on in the heart and mind of a character. The novel I'm working on now is set in southern Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and in Mexico. I haven't spent much time in Mexico, but as I write I'm living in Austin, Texas, teaching at U.T., which helps a bit on the landscape front. Central Texas is not Mexico, but it's closer than the coastal plains ofNorth Carolina. 1his morning I was riding my bike in the fabled Hill Coun– try, got off to answer the call of nature, and came upside my first exposure with a cactus. I had to take some duct tape to my ankle to get all the barbs out. 11-iat's very valuable information. Not that I am going to put it in the book, but hey, I understand a little more about what it's like to live in a place where you could innocently step behind a tree and end up ripping duct tape off your skin for a half hour or so afterward. I like what Eudora Welty said in her essay "Place in Fiction." Place, she said, defines character by confining it. Again, it's all about friction: every place has its limitations and rhythm, every place has a certain ca– dence. It's an extension of character. The notion that something called "setting" is separate from character, which in turn is separate from plot, seems wrong to me. Place is as much plot as it is backdrop. 61
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