Jonathan Raban and Murray admired each other's Northwest writing in part because of their divergent perspectives as a newcomer and a native son along with their sense of a region as part of a much bigger set of forces.
I hear today that Bad Land is to be given the prize awarded in your name by the Tacoma Public Library. I am honored; not least because it will give me a chance to say something about your work, and how it bravely explodes the rather condescending notion of "local history". One of the things I have steadily admired about your writing, since I began to read you in 1989, is how you give American history a specific locale, in the Northwest, without ever allowing Northwestern experience to seem parochial, provincial, regional, merely "local"; but rather seeing your own home turf as a stage on which the large forces of nineteenth and twentieth century history are continually in play.
So many people, including the bulk of "local historians", feel excluded from history-proper, which is imagined to happen in some great elsewhere, whose center is London, or Paris, or Moscow, or Washington, D.C.--with the inevitable consequence that the tone of most local history veers between the apologetic, the boastful, the special-pleading boosterish. (Cf. Nard Jones...); just history, firmly placed in latitude and longitude, full of local details, as particular, and as rich in general implication, as a novel. the Seattle I live in now is still to a very large extent the imagined city that I found in the pages of your book.
This is a verbose way of saying that the Murray Morgan Prize means a great deal to me--and, rare among literary prizes, it has real meaning. It says something important about writing and locality, and how writing which is rooted in the local need--and should--not be "local writing".
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