It’s not your street address

From a writ­ing point of view, does it mat­ter where you live? Cities, large cities, have been where, his­tor­i­cal­ly, and cul­tur­al­ly, lit­er­a­ture thrives. It is cities where mul­ti­tudes of diverse peo­ples live, where you are bound to inter­act with folks not like your­self, where talk fills your ears, where emo­tions are street attrac­tions and the hurly-burly urban world pro­vides end­less stim­u­la­tion. Or, as Samuel John­son put it, “when a man is tired of Lon­don, he is tired of life.” Any large city might do.

I have lived in New York, Chica­go, Los Ange­les, San Fran­cis­co, Prov­i­dence, Den­ver, Philadel­phia, Lon­don, and Venice, Italy. It is most­ly New York, Lon­don, and San Fran­cis­co, which have, I believe, had an impact on my writ­ing, New York most of all—with some fif­teen books or so set there. (But then, I grew up in New York.) Writ­ing my forth­com­ing book, Catch You Lat­er, Trai­tor (Algo­nquin), a NYC tale set in the 1950’s, released a host of com­plex and very real mem­o­ries to cre­ate what I think is one of my bet­ter books.

Yet, hav­ing grown up in a city of eight mil­lion, I now reside high in the Rocky Moun­tains, in a com­mu­ni­ty num­ber­ing thir­teen, of which my wife and I count for two and the oth­ers are at least a mile away. (We are still look­ing for­ward to meet­ing them all.) There­fore, anoth­er forth­com­ing book, Old Wolf (Athenaeum) is a fable about old age and youth, set in these moun­tains. It is not some­thing I would have writ­ten if I had lived only in cities. Indeed, last night, I was out gaz­ing up at the vast Milky Way that graces our heav­en and I thought, the dark­er the night the brighter the stars. Not a city thought.

But ulti­mate­ly, it is what and how you see the world that shapes you, the writer, not your street address. Just reread To Think That I Saw It On Mul­ber­ry Street.