Twenty-one writers answer the call for literature that addresses who we are by understanding where we are--where, for each of them, being in some way part of academia. In personal essays, they imaginatively delineate and engage the diverse, occasionally unexpected play of place in shaping them, writers and teachers in varied environments, with unique experiences and distinctive world views, and reconfiguring for them conjunctions of identity and setting, here, there, everywhere, and in between.

Contents

I Introduction Writing Place, Jennifer Sinor

II Here
Six Kinds of Rain: Searching for a Place in the Academy, Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore
The Work the Landscape Calls Us To, Michael Sowder
Valley Language, Diana Garcia
What I Learned from the Campus Plumber, Charles Bergman
M-I-Crooked Letter-Crooked Letter, Katherine Fischer
On Frogs, Poems, and Teaching at a Rural Community College, Sean W. Henne

III There
Levittown Breeds Anarchists Film at 11:00, Kathryn T. Flannery
Living in a Transformed Desert, Mitsuye Yamada
A More Fortunate Destiny, Jayne Brim Box
Imagined Vietnams, Charles Waugh

IV Everywhere
Teaching on Stolen Ground, Deborah A. Miranda
The Blind Teaching the Blind: The Academic as Naturalist, or Not, Robert Michael Pyle
Where Are You From? Lee Torda

V In Between
Going Away to Think, Scott Slovic
Fronteriza Consciousness: The Site and Language of the Academy and of Life, Norma Elia Cantu
Bones of Summer, Mary Clearman Blew
Singing, Speaking, and Seeing a World, Janice M. Gould
Making Places Work: Felt Sense, Identity, and Teaching, Jeffrey M. Buchanan

VI Coda
Running in Place: The Personal at Work, in Motion, on Campus, and in the Neighborhood, Rona Kaufman