In his book titled Imagined Places: Journey’s into Literary America, Micheal Pearson talks about how people have two basic conceptions of place- the place in which we can live, and the place in which our imaginations are drawn precisely because of the ways in which the place we imagine contrasts with the place in which we live. For Micheal Pearson we need both:
“Everybody has their ideal landscape and an antithetical landscape as well, a place that the person is drawn toward. It’s a place, he feels, that fascinates and startles with the difference from our own home ground. There’s a positive and a negative pole.”
For me, it is prairie and ocean/river. Living technically 10 blocks from the Red River is a microcosm of living 3,000 kilometers from the ocean. The 70 km drive from Winnipeg to Lake Winnipeg a slightly bigger microcosm. All manifest this basic tension in their own way. One roots us, one draws us, and inbetween these places we find perspective
The Stories of my Life 