Editing Jack Hodgins (section)

==Literature and the Environment==
*Hodgins' close relationship with the environment stems from his personal experiences within the temperate rainforests and seasides of British Columbia. Places like Comox Valley, Nanaimo, and Victoria, as well as his travels abroad, have influenced his writing and the contents of his books. His characters in "Innocent Cities" are based on actual residents of the city of Victoria in the late 1900s, as well as people he met on his travels to Australia. "The Invention of the World" is based on the legendary cult leader Brother Twelve and his followers from outside Nanaimo, BC. "The Macken Charm", set in 1956, illustrates the Comox Valley with characters inspired by influential people in his life. He based the many settings in "Spit Delaney's Island" around places he has lived or previously travelled. 
	In an email interview with students from the University of Victoria, Hodgins elaborates on place affecting his writing, and uses "Macken Charm" as his example.

"In The Macken Charm the family gathers (after a family funeral) at the site of a burnt hotel owned by the family. This place exists still. My own memories go back to playing as a child in that hotel when it was no longer in use. I knew that my parents began their married life in that hotel—the old uncle who owned it asked them to move in and look after it and them. My mother learned to cook 
on a stove big enough for a hotel dining room full of guests! All of this is in the novel, pretty well just as it happens, though the characters are fictitious replacements for the originals. The beach, the trees, the roads, the cars of 1956, the store, the funeral parlour, the bridge over the river in Courtenay, the glacier—they're all there. The story is fiction but the place is real."