Regional Writing Quotes

Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

I was aware that you weren't supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors - black and white - because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell.

I'm a Midwestern girl, born and bred. It's harder for some of us to write about things closer to home. It's not so much a fear of telling the truth but wanting to do it justice.

I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.

I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me 'honey.'

There's a view of Montana writing that seems stage-managed by the Chamber of Commerce - it's all about writers like A. B. Guthrie and Ivan Doig. It used to bother me that nobody had a scene where somebody was delivering a pizza.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.

Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.

No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.

In the beginning, I tried to be a more cosmopolitan writer, but I realized that I was a country boy, and I had to deal with things I knew about and where I came from.

I read Nabakov for style, Mary Karr for heart and resonance of where I come from. She's from the same part of the world that I'm from. Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, to read the masters.

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.

I think often people don't realize the great diversity of Southern writing because in their minds, if you're not from the South, it can seem regional and small, and of course that's not the case at all when you start to read the work.

The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast - Mississippi, Alabama and so on.

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.

As Annie Proulx is to Wyoming, so is Jane Candia Coleman to Arizona.

For a long time, I didn't think I wanted to live in the Ozarks or write about the region. It seemed to be a sure recipe for obscurity, and to be obscure was not my conscious ambition.

I have published so many books in so many years. I can't complain about any lack of attention. But I've never been placed as a Southern writer, which I really am. So I was happy finally to be published by someone in the South.