For us, this is an essential task, and one impossible to have done elsewhere. We must describe a reality that has never been fully captured in English. The earlier traditions of English only partially clarify what it is we might say. California literature is our conversation between the past and present out of which we articulate ourselves. Local culture matters because human existence is local.
Events happen in specific places to particular people.
The climate and culture of a city, the landscape and language of a region, shape its inhabitants. The universal is most cogently found in the particular. To be local is not necessarily to be provincial. Regional literature is often initially dismissed in literary capitals, but a huge proportion of the imaginative writing that survives from the past century proudly bears its regional accent. James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Constantine Cavafy, Italo Svevo, William Faulkner, Chinua Achebe, Robert Frost, and Willa Cather are all regional writers of international stature.