I grew up reading William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, who filled their places with wild characters and events. It made me want to create a place and fill it with wild characters and events, too. I spent a lot of time in northern Michigan as a kid camping, fly-fishing, hiking, hunting. There is a mythic quality there I didn’t feel in the suburbs of my youth – or Detroit where I went to college or Chicago where I went to grad school. The real poetry was always in the north woods. It...
