Read “Another Me Exists in a Cabin by the Lake: A Conversation with Andrew Grace about Sancta” — curated by Tiffany Troy and Emma O’Leary in Tupelo Quarterly, March 31. 2023. From the interview:

I grew up on a farm like corn and soybean farm in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. When I first started as a poet, I assumed the poems had to be about cities or have some kind of drama. I felt like the background I was coming from was the most boring possible background. I felt that was an impediment to me wanting to be a writer. I was like, what can I write about: corn, silos, tractors, barns? Nobody wants to read about that, people want to read about “real places.”

Part of my journey from being a novice to now was, No, actually those landscapes hold just as much magic and are just as evocative as any sublime landscape. It takes that deep attention to it to enter. It really is coming out of having a chip on one shoulder being a Midwesterner and having what being told that where you come from is flyover country, the place people fly over to get from one interesting place to another. You hear that enough times and you really just want to get revenge and make the Midwest seem as gorgeous and sublime as anywhere else.

That was part of what I had to learn when I was becoming a writer. That there is no place that’s inherently more poetic than, then the next, even though where I came from is absolutely flat and a prairie, and is just full of perfectly spaced-out rows of corn and soybeans, that there is a beauty to that also. …

To be a poet of place means that you are elevating your place and pay the type of attention to it that you assume other people pay towards New York and Paris and London. Your own acre is just as deserving of a poem.