The World More Full of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema Page A

Manitoba was based loosely
on Neepawa, Margaret Laurence’s hometown. And look
at Stephen King, whose Derry and Castle Rock are clearly
more than inspired by the small Maine towns he knows so
well.
    The question then, I suppose, is why? To get all rhetorical
and third-person-y about it: if you’re going to write about a
place, and you’ve gone on at great length to clarify just how
important the place is to you and your writing, why not just
write about the place? For the love of God, man, why tie
yourself up in knots over it?
    And the only way I can answer is to repeat myself: because
Henderson is not Agassiz. Except inasmuch as it is.
    An anecdote might help.
    Henderson was born in the early 1990s, on the main floor
of the Book Warehouse store on Broadway in Vancouver. It
was the third week of September. I was managing the Book
Warehouse location in Victoria at that point, and I was
working for a week at the flagship store, connecting with
the head office, getting to know how things were done in
the big city. It was a Friday afternoon. I had come back from
lunch at a little Chinese restaurant a couple of doors down
(wonton soup, naturally), and I was feeling the first buzzes
of an MSG reaction when one of the people working there
asked me what I was doing for the weekend.
    So I explained that my wife was coming over from
Victoria and we were headed out to Agassiz for the Fall Fair
that afternoon.
    The Agassiz Fall Fair is a big deal in the way that only
smalltown fall fairs can be a big deal. It’s the equivalent
of homecoming weekend at your better universities:
everybody who can come back, comes back. It’s a celebration
of friends and family, an annual opportunity to re-connect
with one’s roots. This person I was talking to didn’t know
that, however, so I had to explain the Fall Fair in detail.
And after I described the rides and the judging of preserves
and baking and crafts and the beer garden and how much
I missed the old days of the demolition derby, I explained
about the crowning of the Corn King.
    â€œIt’s pretty prestigious,” I explained. “All the local farmers
who are growing corn that year are entered, and their fields
and their crops are evaluated by a panel of experts, people
from the Experimental Farm, that sort of thing. And the
one with the finest crop is crowned the Corn King. There’s
a robe and a crown and everything.”
    And that’s the whole story. That’s what the Corn King is,
more or less (if I were inclined to research further, I would
know exactly who to call — one of the benefits of smalltown
life). Except I didn’t stop there. And to this day, I don’t know
where the next comment came from, or how it came to me.
But came it did.
    â€œAnd then,” I continued, completely deadpan, “at midnight he’s sacrificed to the Old Gods to ensure a plentiful
harvest for the next year.“
    She laughed (of course it was a she); it wasn’t bad as far
as punchlines go.
    I didn’t laugh. And in that moment, my life changed,
and Henderson was born.
    Because
all
that
stuff
about
the
Fall
Fair,
the
homecoming, the crowning of the Corn King? That’s all
Agassiz.
    The mythic, ritual, pagan sacrifice of the Corn King for
the benefit of the community, though? That’s Henderson.
There are any number of perfectly valid reasons to create
a mirror-image of an existing community to use as a
location for one’s writing. Hell, I subscribe to any number
of perfectly straightforward reasons to justify my having
done it.
    Chief among these is likely practicality. Simply put, it’s
easier to write about a place that you’re making up because
you can include what you need. When you’re writing based
in and on a real place, you’re pretty much limited to the
existing reality. Yeah, I said pretty much; I haven’t always
followed that rule, as my mentions of Sherry being treated
at Royal Jubilee in Before