, and they stayed. —— flannery o'connor.ply rooted. and make no apologies for it. no, they were fierce and defiant about their place, about their provincial situation, and about their vernacular language. and that was, you know... i mean i was at university for four years, but i think i learnt more from reading those provincial american writers, who just insisted on their own terms. and if people didn't like it, well, stuff it. that almost, without the blue language, which of course suffuses your latest book, that's sort of the attitude. ijust wrote down a couple of phrases that i love, they're so deeply of this book and your place. the young character, the troubled boy in the book, early on in the book he discovers his father's dead body, and he hates his father because his father's been violent and abusive, and he knows immediately, jack knows immediately that "the old turd was cactus", and that is a use of language which could only come from where you're from, and yet we all, who are not from there, i think in the course