"Dakota is Everywhere" declared the most interesting poet North Dakota ever produced, Thomas McGrath. The statement is difficult for me to read without a sense of melancholy and despair as well as deep connection to the strange, desolate plains, hills, and buttes. Blood runs so thick as to become oil here. The place grabs you. Yet looking into the sky, stars abundant and bright, other worlds call easily into your being. Few ND writers can understand the contradiction of rootedness and flight (although most left and returned). A place of great and powerful emptiness, thus supremely and ineffably spiritual.
I left and return and will do so many times again.

Trained professionally as an anthropologist, upon realizing training to become a writer is useless with no experience to write of. 
Looking for the immanent potentials of fantastic futures from such deep past, I write. Sometimes. Not as much as I tell myself I should.