Writing My Way Home

  I was never able to write about southwestern PA until I left it. My earliest attempts at fiction, in my teens and early twenties, were always set in some vaguely imagined suburbia, never in a small town like mine. When I was that young, all I really knew about my town was that it was a place I was expected to leave. This unspoken assumption took root, signalling to me that a successful life was one lived away from home. I was never explicitly encouraged to do anything in particular, and I grew