The Interactive Watershed:
Excerpts from WAIT AND SEE, ANNIE LEE

About the excerpts from WAIT AND SEE, ANNIE LEE (Warner Books, 2001)

What is a real place -- a set of real coordinates -- anyway?

Places from books, places you can smell and taste and feel even though you’ve never been there – don’t they have a set of brain coordinates in much the same way physical locations do? Isn’t a trip taken in your armchair with a book propped on your lap sometimes more real than anything you could have possibly experienced in real space and time?

After writing WAIT AND SEE, ANNIE LEE, friends in Telluride wanted to know which bar I was talking about, which street Lucas and Annie Lee lived on, and which real people I had modeled my characters on. They all had their differing theories.

I believe that while locations contain and create real histories they also contain and create voluminous fictions that plump them up and make them even juicier and more real. A literature professor of mine in college who taught Moby Dick was fond of telling students that Melville’s novel reveals more of human psychology than any textbook ever could. To some extent, I would say that fiction does the same for the physical landscape.

In the spirit of play, I have given real coordinates to my made-up landscape. Because somewhere -- in the fourth or fifth or twelfth dimension – I’m sure they really do overlap into something indescribably rich and complex.

Michelle Curry Wright
Telluride, CO 2007