There's a place down the street; Seven Xs. What does that mean? Maybe it's... girls without skin.
In little pockets of conversation, old men were telling stories of ancient floods. Women were talking of about how much rain there'd been in other towns -- Paragould, Lepanto, and Manila.
In Ireland every place you visit and every person you meet has a story. And they love to tell you their stories. Everyone is interested in everything; in a land of storytellers, you will never be bored.
In a small cathedral town where changes are few, there are always people who remember who used to live in a particular house, what happened to them there and afterwards, and so on.
I was always told that Hoosier came from when settlers in the state, when a stranger came on their property they'd say, "Who's there? Who's there?" So people that were from Indiana were the people that said "Who's there?" But what do I know? I don't read or interact with people outside the Internet.
Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead - or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky.
It's very freaky in Chicago.There's something in the water there, I don't know what it is. But the actual word Chicago means, in the Indian language, garlic. It was just garlic and mosquitoes there. And that is the roughest city on the planet, and I been to every place in the world.
There was a boy in my building who was my best friend when I was growing up. There was also a mysterious person on my corner who we called the Laughing Man.
Romney Marsh remains one of the last great wildernesses of south-east England. Flat as a desert, and at times just as daunting, it is an odd, occasionally eerie wetland straddling the coastal borders of Kent and Sussex, rich in birds, local folklore and solitary medieval churches.
I have this friend who has a theory that lots of towns have energies. And, for instance, certain places in Alabama have bad ones because they were built on reservations or built on cemeteries or something. But Nashville has a really gravitational, magnetic pull.
I am from Trinidad and Tobago, so I actually grew up in Tobago on the beach, just running around, playing, watching really creative people, and being exposed to really deep, rich stories from a young age.
I'm not sure what the proper label might be, or the most accurate one, but someone once called my stuff Southern Ohio Gothic and I thought that was fair.
Texas is so wrapped up in myth and legend, it's hard to know what the state and its people are really about. Real Texans, raised on these myths and legends, sometimes become legends themselves.
