Hyatts, Sheratons--that's where all those stories take place in which there is no landscape, in which there is not the mention of a tree or the grass or the weather. There is no weather in a Hyatt. Stories that take place in no place--why would you leave out the thing that will most bring alive what you're trying to do? You think the most important thing is that confident voice of that "I" narrator who, let's be clear, is really you when you were twenty-two, and they didn't treat you right, didn't fuck you right, didn't love you right--Momma, first lover, Daddy, I don't care who it was. But I want the story to burn me...You were in that room with him when he said no, he did not want you, and you walked out of the room and it felt as if you were bleeding into your own belly...You went down the stairs, out into the night, and you smelled--what did you smell?...Is it torn-up weeds that you smell? Somebody was sitting on those steps earlier and she was crying, and she didn't have anything else so she reached down and pulled up the grass and ripped it, and you can smell the torn grass in the air.
Dorothy Allison, from her Tin House craft essay on Place