How do we make a life in a place? How do we become of that place? How, when we leave that place, can it be that it never lets us leave? What is the mark it makes? How do we come to terms with the fact that we can never not be of that place. How do we make places, especially rural ones? How do our places make us?

Place, Responsibility, and Stewardship are questions to live—as are ownership, bank payments, family feuds, resentments, control, whiteness. From the land come honey hives, deer plots and wild collards; we undertake conservation of the soil, change the course of the creek so it doesn’t erode; we talk about intervention, stories of our own agency. Also, less often: we say we failed, there was bud worm on the tobacco, the pig barn burnt down, there was cancer. But we lived to tell it, we bore it out.

Laressa Dickey will read poems and talk about growing up on a farm in Tennessee, telling the story of being formed by that place and by the people in it.