Writers in Wyoming have staked a claim to "place." We write about sage and wind and weather and eccentric people as if we invented the tradition. As another creative person – and inveterate WYO traveler – said at a meeting the other day: "When you travel the state, the sagebrush talks to you." Others at the table laughed or blinked back blank looks. But I know exactly what she meant. I drive Wyoming all the time and the sagebrush talks to me. The plants whisper ideas as I pass. Often, these ideas have nothing to do with sagebrush. They may be about an aspect of winter weather that I can build into a story. It may be a behavioral quirk I noticed in a person I met that morning in Worland or Lander. It may carry a reminder from my own past, a snippet of dialogue or an incident that happened to me in Moses Lake, Washington in 1962, or Denver in 1987.

When sagebrush talk, I listen.

I thought about our "place" this morning as I read a travel piece by Lawrence Downes in the New York Times. He visited Flannery O’Connor’s Milledegeville, Georgia, for the first time last fall. Wrote Downes: "I had wondered how her fictional terrain and characters, so bizarre yet so blindingly real, might compare with the real places and people she lived among and wrote about."

Give credit to Downes for avoiding Manhattan-style condescension. But Downes knows and admires O’Connor’s stories. He drives to Toomsboro outside Milledgeville to watch the sun set on O’Connor’s Georgia. He chooses the site because it’s near here where the final scene unfolds in the author’s most-read story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." An Atlanta family’s car accident puts them in the path of "The Misfit." The five family members become the newest victims of the prison escapee and his cohorts. But the family’s grandmother, a petty tyrant throughout the story, experiences a rare moment of kindness when confronted by the stranger. Then he shoots her. The story’s next line: "She would of been a good woman," the Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

This is one of those lines one can contemplate after finishing the story (one thing about O’Connor’s stories – they demand to be finished). Does The Misfit know that nothing in her life so becomes this grandmother as her sudden departure? Is he some kind of Messiah? Is there grace in this blood sacrifice? Or is The Misfit just as crazy as some of the serial killers we’ve witnessed in postmodernist Hollywood movies?

Downes notes that O’Connor was a misfit, growing up a devout Roman Catholic in the land of Bible Thumpers. She was an active defender of the faith up until her untimely death of lupus at age 39. Blood sacrifice and transubstantiation and epiphany were all concepts of Catholicism that she saw actively play out in central Georgia. Her stories bear her imprint of dark humor and irony, two aspects that make her writing stay contemporary. Damn, but "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is funny. O’Connor paints her characters with so many details, gives them voice through their clothes and actions and attitudes.

And then there’s the place, always another character in her stories. Downes finds that out by prowling the countryside, and then poking into the house the author shared – until her death in 1962 – with her mother. The house and grounds, managed by the Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation, has recently been placed on the list of "most endangered places" by the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation. A collapsing barn, the house's cracked plaster, a grotesquely fat hinny (horse-donkey) wandering the grounds – all part of the place today. The foundation is raising money now, and estimates it needs a couple million dollars to do the job right. You literary tourists out there might want to send in a few bucks.

But you can find O’Connor without going to Georgia. Read the stories – and then read them again. And get used to the fact that you will never write as well a she did. You can find many examples of how she brought Georgia to life. In the NYT article, as Downes watched the sunset near Toomsboro, he’s reminded of a sentence from "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," one of his favorite stories: "The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees."

You want to shout "Amen" after a line like that.

I didn’t read an O’Connor story until I went to graduate school in Colorado when I was 37. Why is this? I grew up in Florida, and attended college at two sites that flank O’Connor’s Milledgeville by a couple hundred miles: Columbia, S.C., and Gainesville, Fla. How did an English major at University of Florida graduate without reading a Flannery O’Connor story? How did this budding writer take a writing class with Harry Crews (also from Georgia) and not have some encounter with O’Connor? I was too young or too self-absorbed or concentrating on writers from other places, places outside the South – New York City, London, Paris. I don’t remember my profs or fellow students going ga-ga over Southern writers, or treating them as if they belonged to some club or a "School of Southern Writers." In the 1970s, there were no volume such as "The Best Writing from the South" or a press such as Algonquin near Chapel Hill which publishes only writers who can claim a link to the South.

We do it in the West too. We have a slew of great short story writers. Raymond Carver may have started the trend that’s been expanded upon by Ron Carlson, Rick DeMarinis, Rick Bass (former Southerner), Annie Proulx (raised in the east but has a relative who was a French trapper and founded a small town in WYO), and Sherman Alexie. These writers are more haunted by the West’s facets of Indian Wars and bitter landscapes than by religion. True, both regions had their wars – but the South is the place that became a conquered country, bound together in a lost cause. In the West’s Indian wars, the tribes were conquered nations, while the white folks went about their business building railroads and digging gold out of sacred mountains. It has come back to haunt us, and perhaps that’s one of our motivations as writers.

I am thankful for my links to The South and The West. And to Catholicism. It all adds up to an ability to hear the sagebrush whisper, and some understanding of what it is like to be The Misfit.