A native Midwesterner who spent much of her adult life in the Northeast and now lives in the South, Susan M. Dodd writes fiction that reflects this diversity of habitats and the variety of perspectives that such a peripatetic life affords. While many of her stories are imbued with a strong sense of place, Dodd herself hardly could be characterized as a regionalist author, for there is no one particular place that she is wedded to as a writer. As she explained in a 26 July 1999 interview with Publishers Weekly, "I used to see it as a deficiency in me that I didn't come from deep roots in a place that had this endless well of history like Faulkner or O'Connor did. The place where I grew up could have been anywhere. It had no individual character." She discovered, however, that this lack of connection to a specific place...