The Christmas spirit infiltrated ePodunk this week. The famed 1946 Frank Capra holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, was highlighted by ePodunk users when the community of Bedford Falls made it into ePodunk’s list of top searches. Bedford Falls, listed in ePodunk’s collection of imaginary places and patterned after the real town of Seneca Falls, was this week’s sixth most searched for place in our listings of over 46,000 community profiles.

Unlike the wholesome Christmas cheer that made its mark on the ePodunk US top listings, a different kind of celebration made the small town of Penistone, England the community on ePodunk UK that topped the charts. Our top searches are listed on the right-hand columns of our US and UK homepages.

Happy Holidays from ePodunk!

Last week, I attended the 25^th anniversary gala event for the Writers & Books organization in Rochester, NY. The keynote speaker was John Berendt, a Syracuse, NY native and best-selling author, who was awarded the “Sense of Place” award for his representations of Savannah, GA in his novel “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and Venice, Italy in “The City of Falling Angels.”

After visiting Savannah in 1982 and Venice in 1996, Berendt explained his fascination with each place and the way his experience there was shaped by having an outside perspective.

Berendt discussed the ways that people reflect the place they’re from, whether it’s in their expressions, grammar, the detail in their stories, or their humor. In Venice, Berendt explained that he was shown that Venetian reality is always slightly tinged with fantasy.

Like many authors before him, the locations Berendt writes about are paramount in his novels. Berendt quoted Wendell Barry, who said, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are” and Flannery O’Connor, who said, “The best American writing is regional.”

ePodunk also shows the connection between literature and place on our community pages. Take a look at our literary quotes page that shows how some places have been interpreted and described by literary greats.