If you keep giving me these eyes that note all the details – if you tell me the lawn is manicured but you dont’t tell me that it makes your character both deeply happy and slightly anxious – then I’m a little bit frustrated with you. I want a story that’ll pull me in. I want a story that makes me drunk. I want a story that feeds me glory. And most of all, I want a story I can trust. I want a story that is happening in a real place, which means a place that has meaning and that evokes emotions in the person who’s telling me the story. Place is emotion.
from the essay « Place » by Dorothy Allison published in the Tin House compilation The Writer’s Notebook
