I grew up in Mississippi being told it was a great place, but not feeling that. When I finally began reading seriously, literature showed me something about where I was from which was worthwhile.

Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

Most things don't stay the way they are for very long. I take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses -- those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.