PAUL MICHEL

I'm nearly finished with a collection of short stories, All the Men Are Sleeping, by D.R. MacDonald. I had not run into him before, but picked the book up in a big sale when Epilogue Books in Ballard closed last fall (another independent R.I.P. No matter how much or widely one reads, there's still the chance for those encounters--"chance encounters," let's call them--with writers who inspire one to run-don't-walk to the nearest (extant) bookstore and snatch up everything else the man/woman has written, and such is the case here with me and MacDonald. The man teaches at Stanford and spends summers on Cape Breton. What is it about wild, wet, remote gray places that inspire so much writing that I admire? (And why, he mused, looking out the window at the monochromatic bluster of the Pacific Northwest in February, doesn't life in such a place make me a better writer?) MacDonald uses Cape Breton both as a canvas and a brush, creating an essential sense of place in the manner of Cather or W. Faulkner or Proulx: His reliance on the landscape, characters, atmosphere, syntax and lexicon of the island is neither forced nor merely convenient. Like any good stories, they could be set anywhere, for they are deeply and often painfully human at their core. But their placement in a locale MacDonald so obviously knows and loves provide them a rare sense of legitimacy and soul--a gravitas, of you will, that while certainly achievable is too-often absent in short fiction that is less geographically anchored (including, I fear, my own, but perhaps that's a matter for a notebook, not a blog.) So I'll spend the day pondering Place -- its role, risks and rewards -- in crafting fiction. Frank O'Connor famously insisted (based, as I recall, on advice he received from Yeats) that if you think you have a story set, say, in your grandfather's West of Ireland or today's Southern California or the suburbs of Connecticut in the 1960's or even the planet Xenostrolis in 2319 , you must imagine the story--not its trappings or lingo but the story itself--in, say, Renaissance Florence or Papa New Guinea or you own dreary backyard, and if it still can be written then you may just have a story, and have at it lad. If it can't stand up after a journey (in space and/or time) maybe it's not about people after all, and so you might have some thinking to do. If this is true--and I believe it is--then what role does earth, sea and sky play in the telling of a tale. Merely a setting? Or something more? Perhaps your County Galway story can live in south Chicago, but be changed the way a man might, similarly dislocated? No answers, just questions, and it's time to get my son to school and my butt to the office, which unfortunately is just where I left it.