January 10, 2008

For the first time since I was a teenager I've been writing about Sudbury, where I grew up. Back then I wrote about leaving it. Since then I'd decided it was too uninteresting to write about. But what I realized is that over the years it's become a mythic place, made resonant for me by its atrocities, both visual and social. What makes Sudbury unique -- being a northern mining town -- is also what makes it fascinating. In some ways it was a great place to grow up, but a horrible place to get stuck in if you didn't want to be there. In the current book I've made it sound like a cross between Auschwitz and the moon. No one who's a fan of Sudbury will be pleased, despite the accuracy of what I've written.