When We Say We're Home: A Quartet of Place and Memory

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Perhaps nothing is more complicated than an honest answer to a simple question: Where do you live? Most of us respond with our postal address, but we know that where we feel a sense of home isn't necessarily where we pick up the mail. We give our address, perhaps describe our city or neighborhood, but we know that the truer answer would be a much longer story: the story of where we live now and of all the places we have lived and visited -- the story of where we dwell.When We Say We're Home explores that more complete and satisfying story of dwelling, of home and the desire for home, in its larger and distinctly American context: as a complex and subtle interplay between rooted-ness and dislocation. The four essayists in this remarkable quartet reside in disparate geographical locations, and the details of their personal experiences are as varied as their landscapes. Yet in their stories -- of raising families, of building and demolishing homes, of leaving husbands and losing parents, of surviving earthquakes and floods, of watching light shift and storms progress across familiar and unfamiliar horizons -- we recognize the congruencies at the core of our own arrivals and departures, celebrations, and losses. We understand that the possibility of dwelling is more than a nostalgic devotion to a single place: it is a daily practice of awareness and participation -- a composition of every place and all experience.