Story Settings and Reader Experiences
Even stories set in very local, very specific places like those by William Faulkner and John Steinbeck will find a new setting when I read them. And the landscape I create for them is always specific to me, retracing, or retracting to, places I have lived in, or ones I am familiar with. So right now I am reading Sweet Lavender by Terry O'Neal, and I give it a setting somewhere in Elk Grove, California, either because I know that's where the author lives, but, remember, that's where I work too. The story is set in Cecilia, Louisiana, I place I don't know. I am picturing a house outside of the place described by O'Neal, but it has all the features suitable for the story. It's now my setting, something pulled out of my experience living in specific places. It's a reader-created setting in agreement to the writer's specific or imagined setting. By reading this story, I am bringing a certain experience into it, refusing to only receive what it contains, but ...