All Literature Is Local

It’s perhaps a little known fact that Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, has been home to at least two literary notables. Stephen Vincent Benét was a poet and writer and the author of what some consider the quintessential American short story, “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Hilda Doolittle, otherwise known as HD, is another important figure in American letters. Both were born in Bethlehem, PA, and while Bethlehem is noted for its strong musical, spiritual, and academic heritage, there’s not the same kind of literary scene as such.

That said, I’ve always thought that the myth of a place is central to the stories its people produce. The narrative here is urban decline and renewal, suburban sprawl and now, maybe, contraction, old and new populations, disappearing green space and agrarian cultures and the general homogenization of the mid-Atlantic and resistance to it. The same could be said of hundreds of other places but each one has its touchstones. Billy Joel made the Lehigh Valley’s into a prescient song called “Allentown.” I’m sure local writers could do just as well artistically, and because realism requires reality, it doesn’t matter much that nothing ever happens here; the context is what’s exceptional, the local lens through which you grope at larger forces.

All literature is local, and all literature starts with the writer’s internal narrative, the stimulus-response she’s been hearing since words started making sense. What’s your local legend? What’s your tension? Where do you see something universal in something so no-one-cares specific? Do you have six words on Lodi, Ohio or Elizabeth, New Jersey or Wheeling, West Virginia? Six sentences on East LA or Tallahassee or Nowhere, Pennsylvania? I think you need to share them.

Tags: big city, HD, Hilda Doolittle, Literature, local literature, micro nonfiction, Six Sentence Stories, six word stories, small town, Stephen Vincent Benet, writers, writing