Poet Sandra Beasley says that you don’t have to leave home and move to the coasts to be a good writer:

Every great literary town I have ever visited has been made great largely by its fixed stars, their immediate gaze and winking light. Comets are brilliant in their passage, but they’re not what give us the constellations to steer by. The universe will offer you a thousand loud reasons to move, but sometimes the one quiet reason to stay—“this is my home, and it inspires me to write”—is the one that matters.

One of the miracles of The Divine Comedy is how a medieval Italian poet wrote about the people of his town, Florence, and his country, Italy, and thereby told a universal story that has endured for centuries.