I came here charged with a task: to talk about where some of my work in particular, and speculative fiction in general, might have come from: I was particularly guided toward two pieces, the urban ‘Living in Cities’ and its pastoral precursor ‘Willows’. These pieces have come to represent the manifestation of homeplace in my work, and so I decided to speak of the places from which they came, and, in general, speak about how our work speaks of, if not ‘homeplace’ then ‘some place’, even when we write the most speculative of fictions.

But as I began to examine this task, I realized, as I always do, that in some ways a writer is the worst judge of where the work comes from: in the general sense we learn to talk about our field with remarkable fluency yet in the personal sense we very seldom actually understand the intuitive source of the decisions we make. So I discovered that I was to come thousands of miles, into a country where I do not know the landscape or, in the heartfelt way that leads to comfort and confidence, the language to talk about a set of decisions which are so far under the surface of the slough of a writer's unconscious that they are completely obscured by mud, algae and weeds.

What is a slough? On the prairies we pronounce it ‘slew’ but here I think you may call it a ‘slaow’.

Let me tell you about a prairie slough for a minute. Officially I suppose they are called ‘wetlands’. They often form temporarily at first, in the corner of a farmer's field, a low area which was too muddy to plough that year. Maybe after a few years there is some particularly heavy rain and the pond stays there all winter. In the spring a pair of ducks settles there, a momentous event I have commemorated with a line in one of my stories, and they stay and raise a bunch (a brood, a passel, a waddle?) of ducklings. Next year they all come home to the growing pond, which has managed to last the winter again.