"Regional Writer": Bane or Boon?

U.S. writers have been debating this since at least the nineteenth century, but I recently got to hear two writers discuss whether or not it's necessary to be in a cultural mecca to promote one's books and further one's career.

One writer described the beneficial contacts made over the punchbowl, the serendipitous connections that lead to opportunities when writers mingle among people with cultural power:  editors, artists, agents, other writers, and so on.

The other writer thought that plenty of writers were doing just fine out in Montana.

"Yeah," said the first, but she quickly noted that they're always giving panels about how they're labeled, defined, and confined by being just that.

It got me to thinking, because I was recently invited to contribute to a special "Texas Writers" issue of a  journal I admire.  I was really psyched and pleased that I somehow got on the list of invitees; I loved being in Texas, and I spent important, formative time there, going to school, dropping out of school, waitressing, having my son, going to graduate school, getting a clue, falling in love, and so on.  I chose Texas, and I was in Texas for thirteen years; it's where I feel like I really grew up.  I planted a lot of crape myrtles and honeysuckle vines in Texas soil--and watched a lot of ill-fated tomatoes blister on the vine.  Probably fifty percent of my fiction is set in Texas; one story, "Liking It Rough," is due out soon from Texas Review.  And I've admired wildly for years so many Texas writers, like Naomi Shihab Nye and Sandra Cisneros.  Who wouldn't want to be in that club?

So it was an honor to be included in the category "Texas writers." 

But I was born in Miami.  Part of the reason I got to read at the Miami Book Fair International last year is because of that, and because of the part of my book that deals with Miami and Key West.  Am I a Florida writer?  I'd be honored to be one; my family roots are there.

But what about West Virginia?  From fourth grade to high school graduation, I lived in various small towns in the Appalachian highlands.  That's where I moved from school to school, where I lived through the difficult years that form the centerpiece of The Truth Book.  What could be more foundational to a person's social psyche than fifth grade, or middle school, or senior year?  Am I a West Virginia writer?

On the other hand, as a recent resident of Nebraska, I've been placed on a website of Nebraska writers, which is a warm welcome and awfully nice publicity, but I feel like I've just landed here.  I definitely don't have the grit of the Sandhills in any of my work.  I'm teaching fantastic graduate writers who've lived here all their lives; their work is about Nebraska in fundamental, important ways.  How can we be part of the same group?

Who decides?  The Nebraska Arts Council says you need to be a resident for two years (and prove it with an affidavit) before you're eligible for their fellowships (so I encourage all you Nebraska writers to apply--though creative writing grad students aren't eligible, I'm afraid).  Is two years enough?  Does that make you a Nebraska writer? 

And Indiana?  I didn't start to set creative work in Indiana until I'd been there for several years.  And I don't, even now, think of myself as an Indiana writer, though I spent ten years there and initially thought I'd be there for my whole career.  I tried to settle there, but I never really felt congruent, at home.   I felt like I never really got Indiana, despite wanting to.  Sometimes I'm not sure I get the Midwest--until I go to Manhattan or Boston and feel like a complete country mouse.

I don't know yet whether I'll come to feel at home in Nebraska.  And even if I do, will I write from there, from that place inside that identifies with the landscape, the ecosystem and geopolitical system, as a place?  I've been dinking around with a just-for-fun murder mystery set in downtown Lincoln.  (There's a great place for finding a dead body--I'm not saying where, but every time I walk past it, I hear the opening bars of Law & Order in my head.)  Would setting it here make me more authentically a Nebraska writer? 

If so, what does it mean that my novel-in-waiting is set in New Orleans?  I've seen panels of New Orleans writers at AWP who are so protective of their status, especially after Katrina, that they'd (likely, and justifiably) run me off with pitchforks if I tried to claim the title. 

Elizabeth George is a Californian; all her novels are set in England.  Is she regional?  Would she count as a California writer, when her imagination lives across the ocean?

Does it even have to do with the literary work and how a writer's reputation is configured, or is the issue of regionalism merely a pragmatic matter, an issue of connections and grant eligibility?  Is it just about access to tangible resources?  Would it be better to move to New York and transcend my regional ties, which are kind of tenuous anyway? 

Do New York writers and L.A. writers and Boston writers transcend regional ties, or do we simply norm their work, dropping the "New York" prefix, like whiteness or heterosexuality usually get normed and invisibilised?  (Okay, invisibilised is not a word, but you know what I mean.)  Is their work, which is often deeply about New York or L.A. or Boston--not just the landscape but the cultural assumptions of that environment--somehow just writing, transferable, "universal," while a novel set in Montana always gets talked about and circumscribed in terms of its landscape?  It's seen as rugged, or quaint.  (Does this split echo the urban-rural, coastal-landlocked political divide, the difference between urban experience and what McCain-Palin describe as the "real America"?)  

Is this just another set of boxes writers get slotted into--like genre, and race, and gender?  Is it just another way of marginalizing people who operate outside the centers of cultural power?  And what about migrant writers, who don't feel more of an allegiance to one place that's held part of their life than another? How do they fit?  If I'm personally post-nationalist, how in the world can I take seriously the idea of being affiliated with a single state or city?

I'm just wondering in print here.  If you have reactions, I'd be so grateful for any thoughts that could help me develop my own thinking about this issue.