Epicenter: Deep Mapping Place in Fiction and Nonfiction

As a novelist and a nonfiction writer, I'm always looking to tell America's story. That sounds ostentatiously ambitious, I know, but I think every writer of place holds the seeds of that story, just as every landscape speaks to the whole. My internal writing map begins tightly focused in the place of my birth, southeastern Oklahoma, and radiates outward in concentric circles, like an earthquake map showing seismic waves of energy rolling out from the epicenter, in smaller and smaller blips of intensity, all the way to the coasts. I write to interpret us to the larger world. More essentially, I write to discover us to ourselves—and by us, I mean that core at the center of my literary map: I mean Oklahomans. That's where the greatest force is, where the hardest truths lie. I didn't always know this.

When I was young as a writer, I had few literary references to help me understand who we are as a people, what our story has been. I read The Grapes of Wrath, but for all that I admired John Steinbeck's language and the Joads' character, their voices and sensibilities were not anything I recognized as belonging to us. I read Edna Ferber's Cimarron, but delighted as I was by her quip in the foreword, "Anything can happen in Oklahoma. Practically everything has," I didn't recognize her characters as people I knew. The characters in S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders were more familiar to me, but I think perhaps they're familiar to anyone who has ever been a teenager or an outsider—or both. Susy Hinton grew up fifty miles from me, in the same era I did, and in my junior high school we were also divided into socs and greasers, but teen angst and bullying and lost love and gang violence may take place anywhere.

When I started out, I thought all stories might take place anywhere—anywhere, that is, except the bland, boring, achingly ordinary land of my birth. And so I wrote stories set in the place where I then lived, New York City. I wrote stories set in places I'd visited, Mexico City, California. I wrote one story set somewhere I'd never been, a train rattling through the night in Yugoslavia. Because of my reading experiences, I believed these were the kinds of places fit for fiction. I did not think the little oil company town at the edge of the tallgrass prairie where I grew up, or the hardscrabble mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, where my family had lived for five generations, were places worthy of fiction.

But then I read William Faulkner. I read Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, all the great white southern writers, and in their characters' voices I heard rhythms and syntax I recognized. These were the voices of my parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, preachers and neighbors and cousins in the little town in southeastern Oklahoma where I had spent my summers as a child. Then I read Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. Here, too, were voices I recognized: the voices of kids in my hometown of Bartlesville who lived across the tracks, went to Frederick Douglass Elementary, and, when we finally did attend school together, took separate buses to get there, sat at separate tables in the cafeteria. They were voices I'd heard only from a distance, but they were familiar to me, recognizable in a way that Ma Joad's voice never was.

Then I read James Baldwin. And my dungeon shook.

My dungeon isn't the one Baldwin himself writes of from the inside, but its twin, its spirit double: the prison of white dominance and privilege I'd grown up inside without any awareness I was caught there. I wish I could tell you my prison doors sprang open and the chains fell off, like the story of Paul and Silas in the Bible, but not...