On Being A Local Writer

This was in response to a facebook friend, who described his activities for the day as "a day in the literary life, minor leagues." This got me going on a tangent:

I tend to read your day as the experience as being a local writer, rather than being a minor league writer. This is an issue for me, because I think being local is good... I worked for the Ramsey County Historical Society at one point and learned about "old money" families in St. Paul. It explains a lot about F. Scott Fitzgerald, including why he drank. He's very much a St. Paul writer, just as Sinclair Lewis is very much a Minnesota writer. To me, Gatsby reads like the experience of trying to break into "society" in St. Paul. You can't imagine how closed-in that community is. Growing up at the edge of it, as Fitzgerald did, must have been awful.

Granted, science fiction and fantasy are often not local. But LeGuin seems to me to be very much a product of her childhood and the San Francisco area. The only book of hers that has a lot of background detail is Always Coming Home, set in Northern California. (I need to reread the novel set in Portland. It must have detail as well.) Thomas Disch made sense to me, when I realized he was gay and grew up Catholic in Roseville in the 1950s. That will produce a lot of darkness. Maybe he became a New York writer, though I really liked his novel The Businessman, set in Minneapolis.

I think I am writing this, because I've recently read three essays by people I see as East Coast, entitled, literary writers or would-be writers. Maybe their fiction is rooted somewhere, but their essays sound denuded, as if they have become part of the New York writing world and in the process lost their backgrounds.

But I really don't know what point I am trying to make. The literary life is never minor league. The pay can be minor league, and the reputation can be less than is deserved. The life is important, no matter where it is lived.