I find myself standing here this morning with a mixture of delight and dread. The delight is easy to explain. So being invited to the Town Hall, to speak to the folks who matter most, the people right here at home, is a true honor. The dread stems from the fact that most of my public talks have been readings, not lectures. I am a writer of stories, not a polemicist. I try use my voice to take readers to other voices, not to deliver harangues. And yet we are standing at a place in our history, this valley, where a harangue or two is just what we need.
So this morning, if things go right, this will be a town hall in the truest sense of the word. He taught me that every writer who comes from the land eventually confronts a deep ambivalence about the place that nurtured him. The writer does this one of two ways. He leaves and writes about his place from afar, hoping the distance gives him not only perspective but a rein on his anger and a check on his heart.
Or he stays and tries to work it out from within, the past and the present knocking heads and confusing his feelings. If he stays, his writing sometimes misses the mark. This is because the immediacy he has gained by being so close to his subject can bring too much heat and too much passion. I have chosen the latter, digging my heels into native ground, and it can be messy. And what an odd, paradoxical place it is. It is decidedly rural, decidedly suburban and decidedly urban.
Where else in America can you take a minute drive and go from white suburbia with its brand new schools and football stadiums and 8, square foot houses and giant evangelical Christian compounds to the inner city with its gangs and drug-infested neighborhoods to the dead silence of the vineyards and orchards in winter hibernation?
No region produces more meth and more milk than this valley. If you want to look at the burgeoning political power of the exurbs, come here. If you want to examine the enduring poverty of rural America, come here. If you want to see concentrated urban poverty and IV drug use unlike any other city in the country come to our inner city.
