A couple of weeks ago, I received a note from a student at Oklahoma State University, who told me that her literature class would be studying Tracing Paradise this year. Naturally I was thrilled, but I was also puzzled because (1) I don't know anyone in Oklahoma and (2) I was wondering what (a) Milton and (b) hauling firewood in the cold northeast might have to say to miscellaneous undergraduates from the arid west.

The United States is so large and geographically varied that even strip malls and freeways and housing developments can't entirely erase my sense of regional isolation. I know nothing about Oklahoma, except for scraps of specious information gleaned from novels, social studies books, and movies. Maine surely seems just as mythical to those Oklahoma college students, and I wonder whether that distance will make my book matter more or less to them. Will reading it be like watching a Sergio Leone western? Or maybe like trying to follow the plot of one of those Icelandic sagas where there are two farms named Mork and men spend their entire lives skating around on the tundra thwacking off each others' arms and legs with ice axes? Or will most students prefer to use TP as a beer coaster? It's also just about the right thickness for shoving under a wiggly table leg.