Making art about where you’re from isn’t small. Local stories are what the world hasn’t heard yet.

Distance makes places sound important, which is backwards. The streets you grew up on are unfamiliar to almost everybody else alive, and that unfamiliarity is exactly what makes them worth describing. Treating your own town as too ordinary hands the subject to somebody who will get the details wrong. You are the one with the inside view.

Write or photograph one thing about your area that an outsider would misread. Include the part that is unglamorous. Show it to someone from somewhere else and watch which detail they ask about.