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Nicholas O'Connell's interviews are of that most delectable variety: so casual they could be taking place at the adjoining coffeehouse table, and yet so engaging that it'd be a shame if the espresso machine kicked in at an inopportune moment...(more) and obscured one's ability to eavesdrop. At the Field's End was originally published in 1987; this edition adds a new preface, updated biographical information, and interviews with Denise Levertov and John Haines. O'Connell is interested in regional identity, and "stories," he says, "represent one of the strongest elements of regional identity." While each of these interviews covers very different literary territory--how couldn't they, with the likes of Raymond Carver, Ivan Doig, Charles Johnson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Levertov, and Tom Robbins as their subjects?--it is amazing how much a place can govern its writers and its literature. For many of the writers O'Connell speaks with, landscape is no mere backdrop, in life or work. "It wants me here," says Tess Gallagher of the place she calls home; "I have to obey." "Landscape," says James Welch, "is almost the main character in anything I write." It is the rain that appeals to Robbins, as "It allows for prolonged periods of intimacy.... It keeps you inside where you can turn inward." Gary Snyder feels an affinity more for a particular spot than for the region or its weather. "Every person," he says, "should be the product of a specific place, like a coho salmon or a rhododendron bush." --Jane Steinberg(less)