occupational hazard

"the desert southwest, where i now live, is fast becoming overpopulated, a kind of over-colonized utopia for disenchanted easterners. the desert has always been a place of migration, of transience and rootlessness, of searching and reinvention. there is an exhilaration unto madness that affects people when they first arrive here. vast, untrammeled expanses of space, horizons that stretch forever, skies that billow out eternally - one's whole sense of proportion shudders and shifts.

...As a writer, i accept what my parents gave me, not as the social advantage they hoped i would claim, but from a perspective as the perpetual outsider, which, for a fiction writer, is not a bad position - to be the detached observer who sees what others, more deeply rotted, cannot. there has been an erosion of that wistful, imitative voice of the young writer i once was, and a strong sense of opposite advantage, an awareness that i can speak as i please, watch, observe, listen, record, and define my own legitimate sense of space - i can claim the identity of the transient, the migrant, the epiphyte. i see now that no place is still a firm place, and that displacement can be its own region. i can compare myself to that other famous southwestern desert plant, the tumbleweed, which easily releases from its roots to roll unhindered across the arid landscape. i am not alone or unique in this comparison; there are many contemporary american writers of the tumbleweed or epiphyte variety. botanists know the tumbleweed as a harbinger plant that arrives in an area only when the land has been so traumatized, so overgrazed and depleted, that little else can grow. it appears when there's trouble in the soil. maybe my sort of writer is inspired to write when there's trouble, deep trouble, in the human landscape.

today, in a gentle irony, i live in a ranch-style home in a suburban development near the university where i teach. my lush, irrigated yard has citrus and palm trees, scarlet bougainvillea, and even the full-blown rose hedges i remember from my Californian childhood...as a writer, i emerge from a wistful emulation of the south to new forms of expression in the desert southwest and find myself thankful for all that has come my way, whether by way of liberty to invent or by specific connection to place and people; all of it has been put to use, all of it a gift of voice, fiction's voice, speaking at its finest for the human heart and encompassing, with fleeting precision, all the world."