General Check-In: What (And Where) is Home?
Lately, I've been thinking about "home" a lot. When you teach creative writing, "home" is often the chosen topic for a beginning class, an easy, accessible topic for everyone to write about. But is it, really? The other day, I saw a woman wearing a t-shirt that read "Home is where Yinz Are." (Yinz, for the non-Pittsburghers out there, is our version of "y'all"). It's a twist on the familiar "Home is where the heart is," the idea that the idea of home can be people, rather than a place. For some reason, this really caught my attention and made me think. I've lived in Pittsburgh for nearly three years now, and some would say that makes it home. In many ways, it does. Yet, if someone asks me where I'm from, I always say "Cincinnati" or "Ohio." I don't think I'm unique in finding "home" a complicated question. So many of my friends from college came to our University from ano...