"Story places" show up on my home page because characters gotta be somewhere. My stories all start with place and the other characters derive from that, so the buzz around the idea that setting might be a character always baffles me. Who characters are in a story is how they are in relationship to a particular place, and how each relationship with place tangles with many others.

Stories for me, and setting to me, are also about more than people, and more than a scenic backdrop. Other-than-human characters express their agency, and demonstrate their connectedness, their entangled natures. Despite assertions that fiction is about people, i've never felt limited to human people.