Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as a geography nerd I'm curious about something. It looks like none of your books are explicitly set in the Twin Cities metro even though you've lived in the area for a long time. Is there a reason for this or is it just a coincidence?
Portraits and Ashes is set in a sort of dream-city that includes Minneapolis in its make-up, especially the central public library, a sublime modernist monstrosity in glass, but otherwise you're right. I'm actually leaving this city very soon, returning to Pittsburgh. Maybe it will surface in my imagination when I no longer live there/here. But, in all honesty, the local culture is famously somewhat impenetrable, and most of the people I got to know well in this place were academic or artistic types from either the East Coast or overseas. I remember being at a party in or just after graduate school and realizing that everybody in that house in Minneapolis was from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—and Ireland, South Africa, and South Korea!
Fwiw, no objection to commodification (I got paid to write it), only to not reflecting on how writing for a market/audience/etc presumably presupposes some at least vestigial faith in the possibility of truthfully/effectually communicating in such fashion...
Understood, will make an edit. I was anxiously equating oversimplification with commodification itself, no doubt the residue of my own guilty conscience!
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as a geography nerd I'm curious about something. It looks like none of your books are explicitly set in the Twin Cities metro even though you've lived in the area for a long time. Is there a reason for this or is it just a coincidence?
Portraits and Ashes is set in a sort of dream-city that includes Minneapolis in its make-up, especially the central public library, a sublime modernist monstrosity in glass, but otherwise you're right. I'm actually leaving this city very soon, returning to Pittsburgh. Maybe it will surface in my imagination when I no longer live there/here. But, in all honesty, the local culture is famously somewhat impenetrable, and most of the people I got to know well in this place were academic or artistic types from either the East Coast or overseas. I remember being at a party in or just after graduate school and realizing that everybody in that house in Minneapolis was from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—and Ireland, South Africa, and South Korea!
Fwiw, no objection to commodification (I got paid to write it), only to not reflecting on how writing for a market/audience/etc presumably presupposes some at least vestigial faith in the possibility of truthfully/effectually communicating in such fashion...
Understood, will make an edit. I was anxiously equating oversimplification with commodification itself, no doubt the residue of my own guilty conscience!