I.

Last May, while driving around St. Helena Island in Beaufort County, South Carolina, I saw a painted sign for the Gullah Festival, which I later learned was an annual gathering to celebrate the history and culture of the Lowcountry’s African descendants, whose origins date back generations. I had never heard of the Gullah or the festival. I felt foolish. As someone who had been visiting the area most of my life, I was woefully ignorant of its history.1

Later that night, after a little digging, I learned that Beaufort is actually located in the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which extends south from Wilmington, North Carolina, down to Jacksonville, Florida. It was designated by Congress as a National Heritage Area in October 2006, and is jointly managed by Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission and the National Park Service.

As for a primer on the Gullah people, the National Park Service’s website offers a brief but helpful overview:

The Gullah Geechee people are the descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved and brought to the lower Atlantic states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia to work on the coastal rice, Sea Island cotton, and indigo plantations. Because their enslavement was on isolated coastal plantations, sea and barrier islands, they were able to retain many of their indigenous African traditions. These traditions are reflected in their foodways, arts and crafts, and spiritual traditions. They also created a new language, Gullah, a creole language spoken nowhere else in the world.

What’s not surprising here is that slavery brought the Gullah people to America, resettling them in the south as plantation laborers. But what struck me is how the Gullah as an indigenous community have retained their culture and identity for generations. The machinations of wealth and politics in America normally consumes and homogenizes everything in its path. And with St. Helena Island adjacent to some of the most expensive oceanfront property in the state (i.e., Fripp Island, Hilton Head, etc.), I was surprised it had somehow avoided the bulldozers of real estate developers all these years. Turns out I was wrong.

“The land loss we are dealing with now is due to predatory development and greed,” Luana Graves Sellars told The Guardian in 2023. Graves Sellars is the director at a non-profit called the Lowcountry Gullah Foundation, which helps Gullah families hold on to their land by raising money to pay the outstanding taxes on their behalf.

According to The Guardian, the struggle over Gullah land is not only playing out in Beaufort county. Developers are targeting scenic coastlines in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida. North of Beaufort County on St. Helena Island, Gullah residents are fighting developers’ plans for golf courses and gated communities. Two hours south of St. Helena Island in Harris Neck, Georgia, Gullah people are engaged in a legal battle over land taken from them by the US government during the Second World War. Nearby on Sapelo Island, Georgia, descendants of people who purchased or were granted the land on which they were originally enslaved are fighting zoning changes that could forever alter the rural pace of an island that has only two paved roads.

II.

Last month, while listening to The Art Angle podcast, I learned about Sam Doyle (1906–1985), a Gullah artist from St. Helena Island who spent decades painting the people around him—neighbors, preachers, local figures—on salvaged wood and tin. Doyle wasn’t seeking an audience as much as building a record. Like a newspaper of record—think The New York Times or The Plain Dealer—Doyle’s paintings became the art of record for the Gullah people of St. Helena Island. He displayed the paintings in his yard, what he called his outdoor gallery, where anyone passing through could stop and look.

Doyle’s work feels inseparable from the place it came from. He elevated everyday people, painting their portraits with the same seriousness he approached his paintings of Joe Louis, Ray Charles, or Jackie Robinson. He painted in creolized Gullah language, sometimes phonetically, his text folding itself into the image. He wasn’t documenting history at a distance—he was recording it as it unfolded.

For most of his life, that work stayed on the island. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when Jean-Michel Basquiat began collecting Doyle’s paintings, that it started to circulate more widely. And now, decades after Doyle’s death, those same works are being shown at New York’s Outsider Art Fair, the Georgia Museum of Art, and the Gallery of Everything in London—recreated, in some cases, to resemble the yard where they were first displayed.

I keep coming back to that shift in context. Work made from discarded materials—tin roofing, house paint—now hangs in spaces where it’s carefully lit, priced, and explained. What began as a local act of keeping becomes, over time, something else: collected, translated, made legible to people like me who discover new worlds through art, writing, music, or film.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that kind of discovery. But it raises a question I can’t shake—whether visibility always arrives alongside a kind of distance. Whether a culture has to be removed from its place, or threatened, before the wider world decides it’s worth preserving.

III.

When I think about Sam Doyle now, I keep returning to the idea of his yard—the way he turned it into a space of accumulation and homage, a place of memory held in plain sight. It wasn’t a museum or an exhibition. Instead, transforming his yard was more a refusal to let the people and places he saw disappear. Doyle staged paintings where they were made. They belonged to the same ground as the people they depicted.

I didn’t have that relationship to St. Helena.

For most of my life, it was simply a place I passed through on my way to Fripp Island—a place of privilege that I only had access to because of the generosity of my aunt who invited us each summer when I was a kid. It was familiar but unexamined. I moved through it easily without asking what made that ease possible, or who had done the hard work of actually building Beaufort County and helping grow its wealth.

Learning about the Gullah people—and about Doyle, in particular—complicates that. It makes the landscape feel less like a backdrop and more like a conversation. About memory, about ownership, about what it takes to remain in a place as the conditions around you change.

Doyle painted his community as a way of keeping it intact, or at least of insisting on its presence. But not everything can be preserved that way. Land can’t be painted into permanence. It can, however, be taxed, subdivided, and sold. It can be made untenable to keep.

What I had taken, for years, as continuity now looks more like resistance—fragile, ongoing, and unevenly distributed. The same forces that eventually carried Doyle’s work beyond St. Helena—outside interest, rising value, the slow accumulation of attention—are also reshaping the island itself. Property taxes rise. Developers circle. Indigenous land is divided and lost.

It’s easy to celebrate a culture once it’s been framed, contextualized, and made visible. It’s harder to reckon with the conditions that threaten it in the first place. The question isn’t just how the Gullah story gets told, or where it’s shown. It’s whether the people who made that story can continue to live on the land that made it possible.

On a passenger train from New York to North Carolina, a young Black woman turns to look behind her, a movement that frames her face in the gap between her seat back and a window revealing a blue and white sky anchored by dark trees. The woman, whose name is Jada, is on her way to visit family near Charlotte.

“This is my first time ever on a train ride this long,” she writes in a journal entry. “I’m excited to get away from the city since the farthest I’ve ever traveled was to Maryland.”

This portrait, part of photographer McNair Evans’ drawn inward series—which invites train passengers to write why they are traveling, where they are coming from, and where they hope to go—was taken in December 2024, several days before Christmas. A few months earlier, Jada had reunited with family members and was invited to visit during the holidays. When Evans met her, the train was crossing the Virginia border into North Carolina, and he made two portraits. In the first, Jada cradles her chin in her left hand while her blue nail polish mirrors the color of her shirt, yet her face is out of view. It is an ambiguous image, malleable and untethered without its pair. The second is the portrait where Jada turns to look behind her, an honest intensity in her eyes. She wants to help people, she writes in the last sentence of her journal entry, by working as a therapist for children and adults. Apart, the pictures act like pregnant pauses, so much weight between them. Together they are a sequenced encounter, a closed loop.

Each portrait and first-person account from drawn inward are as much a meditation on the heartache, euphoria, and malaise of the present as they are an investigation of what it means to live in limbo. Evans understands that these passengers are more than avatars. They remind us of the many questions we ask ourselves when shuttling back and forth in our lives. Who are we when we are not at home? What does it mean to live between worlds? When does travel become another excuse to ignore reality? Where are we able to be our truest selves? Why is it so difficult to quiet our minds? How do we reconcile the people we are—and the people we become—between destinations?

“Train interiors are inherently liminal spaces,” Evans explains. “While the passengers change, the backdrop stays the same. The effect is democratizing. People shown in the same space—separated from their environments and possessions—hanging between departure and destination.”

In the pictures that Evans makes, the train car becomes an inflection point between the present and the future, or a physical or metaphorical interzone that evokes feelings of ambiguity or unease. These spaces, so familiar they border on forgettable, still evoke a sense of dread. For Evans, the train car is a blank slate to project the myriad visions he has composed. Empty seats bathed in golden sunlight. An older woman smiling as the baby she holds in her arms touches her face. A balding man in a three-stripe Polo shirt stares at nothing while getting lost in his thoughts. These projections extend beyond the train car too. A prismatic orb floating above iron rails and wooden crossties. Skeletal trees bent like spines along riverbanks. Monuments in mist seen at a distance.

In Evans’ drawn inward series, travel is as mutable as the space inside a train car or the emotions of passengers or the landscape outside their window. After all, no space is more transitory than an airplane between terminals or a car between stops or a train between stations. These spaces are some of the last where we remain suspended in time, closed off from the turmoil of the world.

This essay originally appeared in the catalog for the exhibition Radial Survey Vol. 4, on view November 6, 2025–February 7, 2026 at Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh.

📚 Independent, Reader-Supported Publishing 📚

Each issue of Homesick requires extensive time and resources before the writing ever begins. From research, interviews, transcription, and image sourcing to fact-checking, copyediting, proofreading, design, and marketing, the work that goes into each newsletter is substantial. If you enjoy the Dispatches, Essays, and Interviews that I publish each week, please consider supporting my work in one of the following ways:

• SUBSCRIBE ➡️ Subscribe to Homesick, free or paid subscription.

• RECOMMEND ➡️ Refer Homesick to a friend.

• PURCHASE MY BOOK ➡️ Buy Shopping Mall, my book about the curiosity, ritual, and fantasy of the American mall.

• TIP YOUR EDITOR ➡️ Not ready for a paid subscription? Tip your editor via PayPal.

📖 Read More Essays 📖

Did you enjoy this essay? If so, you might be interested in reading some of the other writing on topics personal, political, and provocative in the Homesick archives. Sometimes a long read. Other times short. To read more essays, visit the archives.

IN THE AGE OF INFINITE SCROLL, moments that give pause are rare. This is particularly true in the world of images, where AI fuckery is pervasive—dominating feeds, dredging IP from the internet like a fishing trawler. At the beginning of March, however, I came across an artwork that stopped me mid-scroll.

It was a striking illustration of an abandoned Philadelphia row house. Bricks painted electric blue are what caught my attention first. It reminded me of a mistint color you’d find on the clearance shelf at a hardware store. Atop the building, the weathered white trim sat like a tarnished crown. Beneath it, a pair of windows. One was like a black eye earned in a fight, the other cracked open enough to coax the weather inside. A piece of graffiti-covered plywood stood in place of a door. Crabgrass sprouted from the foundation, set behind a sidewalk washed in gray watercolors—all punctuated by a blood-red fire hydrant.

The drawing is the work of Phil Perry, a Philadelphia-based artist who, a couple of years back, began biking around the city to photograph old row houses. What struck me about this particular image—a crumbling house gone to ruin—was how much character it had, and how well Perry captured that character. It is an image of decay without the usual melancholy. In other words, this is not ruin porn. It’s quite the opposite. It’s a celebratory homage to a building on borrowed time. And Perry is very aware of each building’s numbered days.

“This is an almost wreckless blue and it seems like the bricks are holding on out of spite and about ten layers of paint,” Perry wrote in the image caption. “I like drawing these places because once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

What’s most interesting is that Perry, 42, is not a career artist. In 2024, as he faced growing health problems, he turned to drawing as a way to cope. I recently talked to Perry about his art, Philadelphia, and his health. Our conversation is included below.

Can you tell me about your background and how you arrived at drawing?

I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease two years ago and was stuck in my apartment for about a year. It takes them a while to puzzle it out, and then our health care system is prohibitive, so I had a lot of problems getting care until I could get insurance. I basically couldn’t leave my apartment, so I was in there drawing.

Had you drawn seriously before that?

I’ve always liked drawing and looking at things—architecture, that type of thing—but I never really went out and bought art supplies. It came out of nowhere.

How did you start getting your work out there?

After a while, I would take my artwork down to Rittenhouse, a park in Center City, basically trading it for Phillies tickets. But people started buying it, so I started posting it on social media. I actually have a little bit of a background there. I used to be a sponsored long-distance hiker and lived in New Hampshire for a while, where I built out a couple of accounts in the outdoor space. I had tens of thousands of followers and would get endorsements from REI, Eastern Mountain Sports, that kind of thing. I thought if I used some of the same consistent social media strategies, it could pay off with artwork—and it did. I took my followers down to about 500, started fresh, and it went viral pretty quickly.

What are “China stores,” and why did you start drawing them?

A China store is essentially what New Yorkers call a bodega—a corner store where you can get anything. Chinese food, American food, cigarettes, alcohol, chips, drinks, whatever you want. Every neighborhood has one regardless of income level. They kind of transcend everything about income, color, nationality. Everybody at least twice a week walks down to the corner and goes into their China store and buys something. Some of them are iconic, and even the ones that aren’t iconic are iconic to the people in those neighborhoods.

North Philly row homes are the primary focus of your illustrations. What is it about those buildings that appeals to you?

I find them really interesting because we just couldn’t build them like that anymore. Those were built in the early 1920s for factory workers—they’re brick, they have ornate wood crowns, and everything on top. There aren’t enough people with that skill set anymore. Those were first- and second-generation Americans who built that stuff. And when you see them getting renovated now, they don’t restore them—they take them down to a skeleton and put back aluminum siding. Once those buildings are gone, that’s it.

Your drawings seem to exist on two levels: aesthetics and documentation. The finished images are striking in their own right and capable of stopping someone mid-scroll, but they also serve as a beautiful record of neighborhood life.

Nobody gives a shit about those neighborhoods—they just don’t. No artist is going up to North Philly to draw these houses or care about the stories the people there have to offer. It is an underrepresented slice of society, really, when you think about it. And I think that’s partly why the drawings took off—those communities never see any representation of what’s going on in their neighborhoods. Go look at the Diamond Market post and read through the comments to see how many people recognized that place. That’s what I mean.

Are you working from your own photos or other people’s?

I ride my bike everywhere, so a lot of them are my own photos. There’s also a guy I know, David Krevolin who runs Rowhouse City, and we do a kind of collaboration that drives engagement a little more, so I use his photos a lot too.

What materials are you using in the work?

Everything—colored pencils, pen, ink, watercolors, and acrylic. You name it.

You’re pretty open about using social media strategically, even when a lot of artists resist it. Why do you think that is?

I think there are two spaces in the creative universe. One is inclusive—people making art to make art, which is most people. The money isn’t the important part, so there’s no marketing aspect, and there’s room for everybody. But the second space is: your artwork isn’t worth anything unless people can see it. You have to have something that stops people’s scrolling fingers. A lot of artists say they hate social media, but where else are you selling your artwork? Going to art fairs means competing directly against everyone who’s been doing it longer than you. You should be using every angle at your disposal. I sold 150 prints last week to people I didn’t know, without leaving my house.

What’s next for you?

T-shirts. I want to do designs on shirts, and I’m also trying to get something together around the Phillies before Opening Day.

📚 Independent, Reader-Supported Publishing 📚

Each issue of Homesick requires extensive time and resources before the writing ever begins. From research, interviews, transcription, and image sourcing to fact-checking, copyediting, proofreading, design, and marketing, the work that goes into each newsletter is substantial. If you enjoy the Dispatches, Essays, and Interviews that I publish each week, please consider supporting my work in one of the following ways:

• SUBSCRIBE ➡️ Subscribe to Homesick, free or paid subscription.

• RECOMMEND ➡️ Refer Homesick to a friend.

• PURCHASE MY BOOK ➡️ Buy Shopping Mall, my book about the curiosity, ritual, and fantasy of the American mall.

• TIP YOUR EDITOR ➡️ Not ready for a paid subscription? Tip your editor via PayPal.

🗄️ Visit the Archives 🗄️

If you enjoyed this interview, I recommend checking out one (or more) of the many stories we’ve published. To read more, visit the archives.

I.

GUNS HAVE ALWAYS INTERESTED ME. I owned dozens as a kid. Toy guns, of course. A black revolver with a metal cylinder for caps. A plastic M16 that rattled when you pulled the trigger. A submachine gun with a removable clip that held yellow rubber bullets. These guns were props used in imaginary battles. I pretended to be John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger) from Commando (1985), or John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) in First Blood (1982). I hid behind trees to ambush enemies. I army crawled to avoid hostile forces. I camouflaged myself to vanish in the woods. But none of it was real—not even when I thought I wanted it to be.

As a kid, the finality of gun violence didn’t register with me. And why would it? What I saw on screen was well-choreographed fiction centered on a protagonist who could kill dozens of enemies without a single bullet wound. I never dwelled on what destruction a single bullet might cause because it was conveniently ignored. In Die Hard, for example, John McClane never paused to wax scientific about how all the bullets he fired were tearing through the skin, bones, muscles, arteries, brain stems, and frontal cortexes of the vaguely European terrorists who had seized control of Nakatomi Plaza. My fictional visions of good guys brandishing guns were cartoonish and uncomplicated. Tidy and simplistic—like the plot lines in a Michael Bay film. Primal imaginative play that pre-dated a nuanced understanding of the violent nature of man. It was also—as fleeting moments tend to be—extremely short-lived.

By the time I was 10, reality began to supplant fantasy. Guns were everywhere—not just in the action movies that I loved, but in government buildings and schools, amusement parks and places of worship. In 1987, I watched Budd Dwyer put a gun in his mouth and commit suicide on live television. A decade later, in 1999, I saw CCTV footage of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murder 13 of their classmates at Columbine High School in Colorado. In 2007, I witnessed a chaotic scene play out on CNN after Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old student at Virginia Tech, killed thirty-two students and teachers, and wounded seventeen others before shooting himself. In October of 2018, while driving my son to a Saturday morning art class at the museum, I watched dozens of police cruisers race past us in response to a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill. That morning Robert Gregory Bowers, 46, killed eleven people and wounded six, in what remains the deadliest attack on a local Jewish community in American history.

II.

GROWING UP IN THE 1980S, guns were glamorized. Not only in action movies, but in cartoons, comic strips, and television commercials. Advertisements for toy guns played between episodes of Super Friends and Transformers. Issues of The Amazing Spider-Man had full-page ads for Daisy BB guns and Lazer Tag. Sunday newspapers included circulars for stores like Kmart that had toy sections dominated by play guns made to look real.

In April 1987, when I was 10 years old, I watched a TV news report that memorably rattled me. It recounted how Leonard Joseph Falcon, a 19-year-old college student from Rancho Cucamonga, Ca., was shot and killed by a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy summoned to investigate a late-night report of armed prowlers at a nearby school. At the time, a spokesman for the sheriff’s department told the Los Angeles Times that Falcon had “jumped out from the dark and posed in a shooting stance, pointing a gun at the deputy.” In response, the deputy pulled his shotgun and fired at Falcon, killing him. But when the deputy knelt to recover Falcon’s “gun,” he instead found a plastic toy laser. Falcon and his three friends—Kevin Bishop (16), Ronald Gross (20), and Michael Henderson (17)—were playing Lazer Tag, a home-based version of the arena-style laser tag normally played in video arcades.

In response to Falcon’s killing, and other similar incidents in San Francisco and Memphis, new regulations were imposed on toy gun manufacturers—particularly those producing realistic-looking weapons. In 1988, federal legislation was passed under Section 4 of the Federal Energy Management Improvement Act requiring that imitation firearms be clearly marked with a blaze-orange plug, or be cast in brightly colored or translucent plastic. These regulations were eventually implemented by the Department of Commerce on May 5, 1989.

In the nearly four decades since, police officers have killed countless minors (and adults) after mistaking fake guns for the real thing. One of the highest-profile incidents in recent memory happened in 2014, when 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by Timothy Loehmann, a patrolman with the Cleveland Division of Police. After receiving a call that a male was seen pointing “a pistol” at random people at the Cudell Recreation Center, Loehmann and his partner Frank Garmback arrived at the park and found Rice near a covered pavilion. Both men reported yelling “show me your hands” to the boy several times. The surveillance video appears to show Rice with nothing in his hands as Loehmann quickly exits the vehicle and shoots. “I knew it was a gun and I knew it was coming out," he reported. Loehmann fired two shots at Rice, hitting him once in the torso. The boy died the next day.1

Unfortunately, little has changed in the years since Rice’s death. According to the Washington Post Police Shootings Database, at least 245 people have been killed by police while in possession of a toy gun between 2015 and late 2021. A further breakdown shows that 22 children under age 16 were fatally shot by police while holding imitation firearms during a similar period (2015–2021).

III.

BY THE TIME I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, my childhood interest in guns had turned to fear. In the early 1990s, Pittsburgh was, like many other American cities, faced with growing gang violence. Inspired by West Coast gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, local sets emerged in neighborhoods throughout the city. Homewood, the North Side, and Beltzhoover were neighborhoods held by Crips, while Garfield and the East Hills were controlled by Bloods. Another gang known as LAW (Larimer-Avenue Wilkinsburg) had also risen to prominence.

I was safely insulated from gangs in the suburban neighborhood where I lived. When I was in the city, however, I sometimes crossed into gang territory by accident. Usually to paint graffiti. The first time was in East Liberty. It was after midnight in spring of 1992, and my friends and I were tagging walls in the alleys off Penn Avenue when a young boy, who couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12 years old, rode up to us on a BMX bike to deliver a message: “You white boys better get the fuck out of here before you get shot.” We took the advice, retreating to my friend’s beat-up gold Chevette parked several blocks away.

A few months earlier, when the weather was still cold, I was out with friends when our car stopped at a red light in Wilkinsburg—the neighborhood where I used to live until moving to the suburbs in junior high. It was night. Tailpipe exhaust hovered like fog around the cars. When I looked to my right there was a Crown Victoria filled with boys our same age. I met eyes with one of them and he smiled. I gave him a head nod and he flashed a silver semi-automatic handgun, tapping the barrel against the glass before the light turned green and the car pulled away. I realized his smile was less a greeting than it was a silent message: We are not to be fucked with.

Several years later, during college, I was driving along South Avenue in Wilkinsburg. It was 5:45 a.m. and I was on the way to my job as a stock clerk at Sears. It was a route I had driven hundreds of times. It was still dark when a man darted in front of me. I slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting him. The man slapped both of his hands on the hood in a hopeless attempt to either stop the car or catch himself from falling. We met eyes for a moment. He was naked except for underwear. As quick as we saw each other he was gone—turning sideways and disappearing in a thin gap between two nearby houses. Before he was out of sight, four men in FBI windbreakers drew their shotguns, ordering the man to freeze. But it was too late. He was nowhere to be found.2

IV.

IN MARCH 1999, RONALD TAYLOR KILLED THREE MEN and wounded two others. After shooting John Kroll, a maintenance worker performing routine repairs at Taylor’s apartment in Wilkinsburg, he walked to a nearby Burger King on Penn Avenue, where he fatally shot Joseph Healy, a 71-year-old former bank employee and priest. Moments later, Taylor approached a nearby McDonald's and fired multiple shots at a van belonging to 56-year-old Richard Clinger, who was waiting in the drive-thru lane. Several shots hit Clinger. His stepdaughter, who was in the passenger seat, ran to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts to get help. After firing shots outside the restaurant, Taylor entered the McDonald's and shot Steven Bostard, a 25-year-old shift manager. He then returned to the parking lot and shot Emil Sanielevici, a 20-year-old waiting in the drive-thru lane. Sanielevici later died, while Clinger and Bostard survived after being treated at a nearby hospital. At 11:51 a.m., John Kroll, the maintenance worker Taylor shot during an altercation at his apartment, died from his gunshot wound while awaiting surgery.

Michelle and I were driving home that morning at the same time that Taylor was on his rampage. We were on South Avenue, a street that runs parallel to Penn where the McDonald’s is located, and we saw police cars speeding past with sirens flashing. It would be another hour or so until we fully understood what was happening. We just knew it was serious. Back at our apartment, when we turned on the TV, we saw our neighborhood on the news.

V.

AS A YOUNG PARENT, MY FEAR OF GUNS metastasized as my family grew. Not in irrational ways, but in the ways that your world feels more fragile when you have children. The common parental refrain—that you just want your kids to be happy, healthy, and safe—is common for a reason. It is core to how you navigate everyday life once you are responsible for another person’s well-being.

In September of 2003, when Michelle and I decided to leave our longtime apartment in Pittsburgh’s East End to buy a house in a nearby first-ring suburb, guns were on my mind. That’s because gunshots had become as common a sound as kids playing in the streets, or cars rumbling across cobblestone, or late night train whistles. Watching a movie in our living room, windows open to catch the breeze, we sometimes heard the pop of gunshots in the distance. Some nights they sounded only several blocks away. Other nights they were much closer. That last summer in our apartment, on several particularly violent nights, they were the closest I had ever heard. After talking to neighbors, we learned that multiple shootings had taken place on the street behind our house. Some of the victims lived, others did not.

I used to wonder what it would take to for me to leave a place that I loved. That summer, as we shopped for houses and talked about starting a family, I found out.3

VI.

I began writing this essay in early January, a few days after Renée Good was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Like nearly everyone, I watched the shooting unfold on my phone. The video was horrifying in its banality. Several gunshots are heard before Good’s SUV drifts into a snowbank. Then it’s over. It’s hard to comprehend that you just watched a woman get killed. A 37-year-old woman, and mother of three. Someone’s partner, daughter, niece, friend, co-worker. Gone.

Seventeen days later, when Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the VA, was pepper-sprayed, shot, and killed by ICE officers in Minneapolis, it felt the same. Unreal. Untrue. Except it was real—it was true. As I watched his body fall to the ground, it reminded me of how a person’s weight shifts when they blackout. They change from lively to lifeless in a split second. That’s what it looked like when Alex Pretti fell to the ground. Please get up, I thought. Please get up.

* * *

📚 Support Independent Publishing 📚

Each issue of Homesick requires extensive time and resources before the writing ever begins. From research, interviews, transcription, and image sourcing to fact-checking, copyediting, proofreading, design, and marketing, the work that goes into each newsletter is substantial. If you enjoy the Dispatches, Essays, and Interviews that we publish each week, please consider supporting my work in one of the following ways:

• SUBSCRIBE ➜ Subscribe to Homesick, free or paid subscription.

• RECOMMEND ➜ Refer Homesick to a friend.

• PURCHASE MY BOOK ➜ Buy Shopping Mall, my book about the curiosity, ritual, and fantasy of the American mall.

• TIP YOUR EDITOR ➜ Not ready for a paid subscription? Tip your editor via PayPal.

📖 Read More Essays 📖

Did you enjoy this essay? If so, you might be interested in reading some of the other writing on topics personal, political, and provocative. Sometimes a long read. Other times short. To read more essays, visit the archives.

Endnotes

I.

Intersections between the natural world and the built environment have always fascinated me. Whether it’s lush grasslands flourishing beneath highway overpasses and vacant buildings reclaimed by knotweed or crumbling roads cordoned off from public use and transmission towers with dirt-bike trails threaded below, there is an allure to these spaces that, for years, I was unable to articulate. They are wild in man’s absence, yet the human imprint is still visible: graffiti, empty liquor bottles, broken furniture, footpaths worn in tall grass. Evidence of life—human, animal, insect, plant—is everywhere. But it is also a type of oblivion—a place between places. The existence of these in-between worlds, and understanding their origins, is what first piqued my interest.

In August of 2023, several years after Shopping Mall had been published and I was gathering material for another potential book, I started a notebook to collect ideas and research related to the intersectional spaces between humans and nature. I wrote down terms like Anthropocene, defined as “an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.” I made a reading list that included a seemingly odd assortment of books—from God’s Own Junkyard by Peter Blake to Underland by Robert MacFarlane. And I began collecting photographs that visually represented this concept, including Edward Burtynsky’s massive photography of scale and human impact, and Tag Christof’s haunting but beautiful pictures of the American landscape and its faded monuments to capitalism. The book would look at these spaces where the built environment bleeds into the natural world, and vice versa. Essentially, where humans and nature meet, alter, improve, degrade, or disrupt one another.

As a young kid, I saw these spaces from behind the passenger-side window of my dad’s Plymouth Duster on our way to school or the grocery store or my grandmother’s house near the Norfolk-Southern railroad tracks that carried trains eastward to Harrisburg and Philadelphia. Growing up in the postindustrial expanse of Pittsburgh in the eighties and nineties, decay was omnipresent. But so too was a weird sense of wonder. Railroad tracks were like old footpaths and abandoned buildings were inner worlds to investigate. Highway overpasses offered invigorating near-death experiences while slag heaps dotted with construction debris inspired crude adolescent weapon-building and object destruction.

In the realm of postwar and contemporary art, this type of interzone is what curators and artists often refer to as “liminal space,” an inflection point between the present and the future, or a physical or metaphorical limbo that evokes feelings of ambiguity or unease. Liminal space, as a concept, evokes a certain sense of dread. Think abandoned shopping malls or shuttered theme parks or empty hotels. These spaces also exist in video games and are fodder for hundreds of YouTube videos.

II.

As I began to sketch out what this book could be, I also looked to John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World as a place to start or at least draw inspiration. Comprised of five books—Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986), Assembling California (1993), and Crossing the Craton (2002)—McPhee’s Annals is career-spanning work. On the surface, it’s a book about geology. But as you travel with McPhee throughout North America, you learn it is a book very much about time, wonder, and what it means to be human:

If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.

McPhee is smart and incisive and analytical, and his writing is based in facts either discoverable in nature or proven out through science. My writing, on the other hand, traffics in memory and research filtered through lyrical memoir-based narratives. It lacks the rigor required for such serious work, I told myself. But then again, why would writing about these liminal spaces between neighborhoods or towns or city blocks or suburban developments or forests or highways need to be so serious? If anything, a certain level of absurdity abounds. Thinking more about the joy and wonder found in these unlikely spaces, I was reminded of a perfect example.

III.

In 2001, not long after the September 11 attacks, photographer Joel Sternfeld approached publisher Gerhard Steidl with a book proposal. For two years before the attacks, Sternfeld had been photographing a stretch of abandoned railroad tracks on Manhattan’s West Side. He was working with a preservation group called Friends of the High Line that wanted to transform the nearly two miles of track into a park. And they wanted to do so before corporate and political interests could rush forward commercial development plans. The resulting book, Walking the High Line, is an otherworldly collection of photographs that perfectly illustrate the delicate line between the built environment and the natural world. In part, Sternfeld’s images reveal how a re-wilded New York might look. However bittersweet, they also offer a final glimpse of the city in its pre-gentrification era. Looking at them for the first time in years, I was struck by how well Sternfeld’s photographs telegraph the beauty and awe of untamed nature while foreshadowing the dystopian landscapes that, to this day, still dominate American films, television, video games, and books. Twenty-five years after the images were first made, they remain relevant but unsettling.

IV.

Still, is it possible these spaces between have remained unnamed and maybe even unrecognized by writers, researchers, or scholars. Surely not. That’s when I discovered Marion Shoard, a British writer and environmentalist known for her work concerning access to the countryside and land-use conflicts. In 2002, she coined the term “edgelands,” which explicitly refers to the spaces between town and country:

Between urban and rural stands a kind of landscape quite different from either. Often vast in area, though hardly noticed, it is characterised by rubbish tips and warehouses, superstores and derelict industrial plant, office parks and gypsy encampments, golf courses, allotments and fragmented, frequently scruffy, farmland.

In her essay, Shoard continues to refine her definition:

All these heterogenous elements are arranged in an unruly and often apparently chaotic fashion against a background of unkempt wasteland frequently swathed in riotous growths of colourful plants, both native and exotic. This peculiar landscape is only the latest version of an interfacial rim that has always separated settlements from the countryside. In our own age, however, this zone has expanded vastly in area, complexity and singularity. Huge numbers of people now spend much of their time living, working or moving within or through it. Yet for most of us, most of the time, this mysterious no man's land passes unnoticed: in our imaginations, as opposed to our actual lives, it barely exists.

What Shoard articulates in that last sentence really stuck with me: “this mysterious no man's land passes unnoticed: in our imaginations, as opposed to our actual lives, it barely exists.” It sticks with me because in Pittsburgh, where I live, ongoing disputes between city government and those experiencing homelessness have spotlighted these spaces in ways I wasn’t expecting—or at least wasn’t expecting would inform my thinking. Often the disputes arise over the encampments that pop up in edgelands all around the city: beneath highway overpasses, up against railroad property, or along hard-to-access riverfront space. If the edgelands themselves go unnoticed—and more pointedly, unused—why does the city value them more when empty than when serving to shelter those in need?

The commonality among these wide-ranging, seemingly disparate examples, of course, is human behavior. How the choices of a few shape our living conditions and alter our futures. How those in positions of power prioritize profit over the welfare of people. How moneyed interests forever strive to own and control more. How history infinitely repeats itself. It begs the question: What does a place say about its people?

This piece contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, a retailer that supports local bookstores. As an affiliate of Bookshop, Homesick earns a small commission when you click through and make a purchase there.

In 1994, Jacques Derrida published The Politics of Friendship, a book collecting a series of lectures the late philosopher had given on the topic a decade earlier. Friendship, he believed, represents a social bond that encourages us to envision a collective future untroubled—or at least less burdened—by the grave possibilities of the present. In other words, friendship, like any relationship with its own origin, history, and timeline, requires a certain suspension of disbelief that allows us to move through each day unbothered by the inevitability of loss and the fact of our own mortality.

At an atomic level, we are aware that all friendships end. We drift apart socially or intellectually. We no longer share the same interests, or laugh at the same jokes. Our moral compasses fail to align. What originally forged the friendship no longer sustains it. Or we become too busy with our own lives, whether raising children, working demanding jobs, caring for aging parents, or struggling to just get by. Tragedy steps in too, or illness, and friends are taken from our lives much sooner than we ever expected. But how do we prepare for these inevitabilities? Is it even possible?

In Stay True, author Hua Hsu’s brilliant coming-of-age memoir, friendship is a central theme and so too is the grief that Hsu faces after his friend Ken is shockingly murdered during a carjacking. The latter detail, which is mentioned on the book’s dust jacket and defines much of its third act, still surprised me when it happened. That’s because Hsu and Ken are such complementary characters in each other’s lives that it became almost impossible to imagine one without the other. But that is the magic of Hsu’s writing in this memoir—it is honest and self effacing, funny and sad, but never overly saccharine or nostalgic.

Set predominantly in the Bay Area of the mid-1990s, with much of the narrative taking place on the campus at UC Berkley, Hsu strikes up an unlikely friendship with Ken, whose passion for music (Dave Matthews), fashion (Abercrombie & Fitch), and friends (he’s in a fraternity) couldn’t be farther from his own. Hsu frequents record shops, stays up late making zines, and carefully curates a closet of thrift-store fits. Yet the pair find commonality in their shared experience as Asian Americans and the unexpected ways their personalities and interests converge around music, culture, film, and philosophy.

“The intimacy of friendship lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another,” Hsu writes in Stay True, paraphrasing Derrida. “We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them.”

In 2019, three years before Hsu published Stay True, he wrote about Derrida’s Politics of Friendship in a piece for the New Yorker, where he is on staff. What stands out to me in that piece is not so much Derrida’s take on friendship as it pertains to politics (because, if I’m being honest, reading philosophy often leaves my brain in knots), but in the realization that Hsu arrives at in the final paragraph of the essay, where, while not mentioned by name, Ken’s memory is ever-present:

My mind drifted toward more banal thoughts, such as whether modern politics is suspicious or unaccommodating of friendship, of the commitment to strangers that we assume as citizens. And then I thought about all the intimacies, shared over cigarettes and alcohol, on the edge of a tomb, which I had once tried to forget. Wounds of a different sort, the ecstasy of having once felt known.

In this passage from Hsu’s New Yorker essay—which, in slightly different form, finds its way into Stay True—you can see how Derrida’s writing flipped a switch in the author’s mind. “Recognizing oneself in the eyes of another” is the type of seemingly simple revelation you have as a writer that, in reality, is not at all so simple. As it relates to Hsu’s growth as a person, his ability to see beyond the artifice of Ken’s music and fashion choices is a watershed moment. Had he remained walled off, limited by his own tendency to pass judgement on people before actually knowing them, his friendship with Ken may never have existed. In many ways, Hsu’s emotional growth is the beating heart of the book, which makes the tragic third act that much more devastating.

After Ken’s murder, Hsu writes about the distinction between life with his friend and life without, and how he wanted his memories to act as an undisturbed archive:

I wanted to impose structure on all that had come before that July night [when Ken was killed], turning the past into something architectural, a palace of memories to wander at my own leisure. [Our friend] Sammi described us as “looters in a city on fire”; I nicked the phrase for later use. Your consciousness was like a city, and you scavenged and searched for treasured memories of better days. Or maybe memory is more of a fire than a city. It’s uncontrollable, fickle, and destructive.

At the core of Stay True is the idea that people are complicated, and that contradictions and incongruities can and do co-exist—whether in our friends or ourselves. In Hsu’s case, recognizing and embracing those idiosyncrasies was critical to the bond he and Ken forged, and eulogizing those memories in a book became the perfect tribute to a brilliant friend whose life was far too short.

Recommended Reading

“Stay True is as affecting as a great pop song.” —Jenn Pelly, Pitchfork

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.

BUY THE BOOK

This piece contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, a retailer that supports local bookstores. As an affiliate of Bookshop, Homesick earns a small commission when you click through and make a purchase there.

Welcome to Homesick, a newsletter about place, identity, and the complicated nature of home. Each week, we investigate these themes through the lenses of art, culture, and politics, with the hope of better understanding our place in the world. Did someone forward you this newsletter? If so, you can subscribe, read our archives, or visit HMSCK.com to learn more.

Meditations in an Emergency is an occasional series spotlighting the people and places caught in the eye of our current political storm—reflecting the country at a critical juncture in history.

LOS ANGELES IS ON MY MIND. It has been for weeks, since the initial wave of arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were carried out on June 6. Over 40 immigrants were arrested in those raids. Day laborers at a Home Depot in Westlake were targeted, as were employees at Ambiance Apparel in the Fashion District. What keeps playing in my head are the videos. In the aerial news footage of the Ambiance raid, white passenger vans are shown pulling into the back parking lot, flanked by dozens of militarized ICE, FBI, and HSI officers wearing masks to protect their identities. Undocumented workers are cuffed and taken into custody. Protesters and family members plead with law enforcement. Some try opening van doors to free their friends or family members. Others use their bodies to block the vehicles from leaving the lot. But nothing works, and moments later all those people are just gone.

I’ve wanted to write about Los Angeles for weeks, but had no idea where to start. Do I write about how unprecedented it is for a president to deploy the National Guard against protesters? Do I write about how extraordinary it is for a president to send Marines into an American city? Do I write about how damaging it is for a president to perpetually weaponize the rhetoric of fear? Do I write about how mentally abusive it is for a president to gaslight millions of people every day? How do you counter a false narrative characterizing the city as a place consumed by violence and turmoil when people on the ground proved otherwise through videos and photographs of peaceful demonstrations? How do you correct the record to point out that the most inflammatory acts—an autonomous vehicle set on fire by a few bad actors—were amplified the loudest while life generally went on as usual across much of the city?

It is exhausting to be subjected to the nonstop fuckery of a geriatric grifter like Trump, a man whose narcissism knows no bounds and whose insecurities are endlessly overcompensated for with the most unconvincing strongman act in American political history. To witness Los Angeleno people being kidnapped, families being separated, and entire lives upended while half the nation applauds, reminds us that so many Americans are not capable of empathy or looking at issues like immigration reform with patience or grace. A quick look at social media feeds or comments on news articles about the ICE raids, reveals so many people celebrating our march toward authoritarianism. Why is half the country so willing to accept the broken ideals and warped authority of a man without conscience?

I FIRST VISITED LOS ANGELES in the summer of 2001, when I was 24 years old. Michelle and I were on a monthlong cross-country roadtrip, and the route from San Francisco to Los Angeles on the Pacific Coast Highway was an anticipated highlight. What I remember most about arriving in Los Angeles was parking at an overlook in the Hollywood Hills, where I could see the Hollywood sign behind me and the sprawling city below. To say it was breathtaking sounds trite—it was otherworldly. At that point in my life, I had never been further west than Ohio. As far as I was concerned, being in Los Angeles was no different than traveling to Europe or Asia or Africa—it was all so much bigger than the world I knew as a Rust Belt kid struggling to navigate early adulthood.

Going to California was a lifelong interest of mine, inspired in part by the versions of the state I had watched on television, seen in films, and read about in magazines my whole life. I recalled the opening scene from Pulp Fiction, where Pumpkin and Honey Bunny rob a 1960s-style coffee shop, and my idea of a Los Angeles restaurant was cemented. I remembered John Belushi’s death due to an overdose of cocaine and heroin at the Chateau Marmont, and my image of Hollywood tragedy was crystallized. I replayed music videos in my head: Axl Rose stepping off a bus on the Sunset Strip in the video for “Welcome to the Jungle,” Johnny Depp in a tattoo parlor in Tom Petty’s “Into the Great Wide Open,” or Alicia Silverstone in a trio of memorable Aerosmith videos set in Los Angeles.1 These were the pop culture images of the city seared into memory as a teenager in the nineties.

As we drove down Sunset Boulevard in our silver Volkswagen, the Church of Scientology building caught my attention. It was topped with two-story-tall letters that spelled out S-C-I-E-N-T-O-L-O-G-Y at a comical scale. Later we passed Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where Shrek was showing—a reality check that made the famous institution far less interesting. That first visit was a tourist’s crash course in getting to see the city, not necessarily to know it.

Fast forward half a decade and things changed. Between 2005 and 2009, during my stint as an automotive journalist, I made regular trips to Los Angeles to attend the annual auto show at the Staples Center and test drive cars to write reviews for the magazine where I worked. Those trips afforded me opportunities to explore the city. I frequented Family, a now-shuttered bookshop on Fairfax with an incredible selection of zines, comics, alt-lit, small press selections, and rare books. The Supreme shop was still across the street at the time, before it relocated to the Sunset Strip, and I would stop in to shop and watch skaters carve the massive wooden bowl that sat like a nest in the center of the store. A friend from high school was pursuing his MFA at the time, and I would visit his studio at UCLA, and later we would catch up while walking around Venice. Another friend, a writer and publisher I met early in my career, lived in Echo Park, and we met up each time I was in town, usually bullshitting over ramen and beer at a noodle bar.

While at times I felt intimidated by the sprawling size of Los Angeles, I loved it for its wildly diverse geography and shifting personality from neighborhood to neighborhood. I would steal away from the auto show during a lull in the action to go sit on the beach in Santa Monica, dip my feet in the Pacific Ocean for an hour before heading back to cover a late afternoon press conference. I remember sitting in an empty bar in the Garment District one afternoon talking to the bartender about, of all things, blogging and what it meant for traditional publishing. It turns out I’ve always been a nerd.

FOR ALL THE POLITICAL-INDUCED ANXIETY AS OF LATE, smart and thoughtful people are on the ground, writing about and documenting what’s happening. The ICE raids and citizen protests in Los Angeles are perfect examples. “Inspired by the courage of the most vulnerable, tens of thousands in LA and across the country have undertaken bold action,” Roberto Lovato wrote last week in The Nation, including “health workers putting their bodies on the line to defend immigrants; teachers developing “tools of resistance” kits for students, families and communities; unions mobilizing to protect workers; students refusing to bow down before heavily armed marines and militarized police; community members driving ICE out of homes, hotels, and other workplaces; and thousands of everyday people defending their friends and neighbors against ICE.”

Last week, in an essay by Rhys Langston for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Los Angeles–born musician, writer, visual artist, and educator recalled his experience of a week occupied by ICE. “As this relentless campaign continues, we must now consider the question: Why have we been given an oppositional strategy that aims us ultimately toward awareness as a political tool of resistance?” Langston wrote. “For once that action becomes a state of being (“being aware”), the accoutrements of that stasis show themselves as props of passivity and consumption: bingeing MSNBC or CNN for updates, sharing infographics, buying sloganized merchandise. In the end, fascism loves awareness, for awareness is a prerequisite of fear, spectacle, and ultimately an attendant brutality.”

TO UNDERSTAND THE CHARACTER OF A PLACE, I often turn to photography. Not necessarily because images always illuminate a place, but because photographers, like writers, are diligent observers. With the population of Los Angeles approximately 47% Latino, I was reminded of the work of photographer Thalía Gochez, whose pictures I first encountered on the cover of Aperture’s “Latinx” issue.

“I’ve always been interested in highlighting story and identity,” Gochez said in a 2022 interview. “I create for my community and if they feel seen and find sanctuary in my work, then I’ve done my job—I don’t need mainstream America’s approval to know that the folks I capture and their stories are beautiful.”

In her practice, Gochez, a Los Angeles native, prioritizes the experience of her subject—often viewing her portraits as collaborations with the sitter. The photo book that she is working on, tentatively titled De donde eres?, which in English translates to “Where are you from?”, is focused on immigrant stories. Given the federalized xenophobia on display in Los Angeles this month, to end with Gochez’s intimate portraits celebrating Latinx identity seems fitting.

WHAT IMAGES COME TO MIND when you think of Buffalo, New York? Do you envision mystical woodlands shrouded in fog, or a lone white deer wandering beside graffiti-covered highway walls, or a waif-like boy on crutches bathed in golden sunlight? Most likely, the answer is no. That’s because these are not ordinary pictures. Photographer and Buffalo native Gregory Halpern, who has made a career upending the expectations of what a photograph is and what it can be, has been working on this series for more than two decades. What makes these images so captivating is Halpern’s attention to the intersection between the familiar and otherworldly, and his ability to thoughtfully record these ordinary moments—from a young girl lost in thought sitting in the passenger seat of a car to a dozen eggs, some broken some not, artfully scattered on the sidewalk.

Halpern has repeatedly looked to Buffalo as his muse, often defying the familiar narratives of post-industrial decline by introducing a strain of the surreal into images populated by real people in the real world. While his work firmly falls into the social documentary tradition, the nuances in Halpern’s pictures remind viewers that two realities can exist at once: What we see with our own eyes, and what the photographer wants us to see.

“I’ve always found Buffalo kind of magical, which I realize to some people might sound like a ridiculous statement,” Halpern said last year in an interview for Aperture magazine. Conducted with his brother, journalist Jake Halpern, the photographer believes his infatuation with spaces stems from their adolescent adventures together. “I often think about when we were kids, exploring buildings. There were some key amazing buildings that I often think about as the source of my interest in where ‘realism’ and ‘surrealism’ come together.”

In King, Queen, Knave, photographer Gregory Halpern’s latest monograph, the Buffalo native conjures a dreamlike narrative that blurs the line between fact and fiction, leaving interpretation in the viewer’s hands. Threading together two decades of pictures that chronicle Buffalo’s people, places, and idiosyncratic moments, Halpern broadens his ongoing documentation of a place that has long had deep personal meaning to him.

One influence that Halpern returns to, citing his work in interviews and reflecting it in his own practice, is Milton Rogovin, the optometrist and persecuted leftist who turned to photography in the late 1950s as a way to document poor and disenfranchised populations in Buffalo, Appalachia, and elsewhere. Like Halpern, the late Rogovin was a Buffalo native whose photography, while lesser known than contemporaries like Walker Evans, helped to shape and define the social documentary tradition. But where Halpern’s color portraits and landscapes can take on an almost painterly quality, Rogovin’s predominantly black-and-white images telegraph a calcified urgency. His series on Buffalo’s storefront churches, published by Aperture in 1962, is the perfect example.

In this latest monograph, however, Halpern’s connection to a photographer like Rogovin feels distant. Shifting between dreamlike and contemplative, Halpern’s Buffalo is an otherworldly landscape where clapboard houses exhaust puffs of white smoke like locomotive engines and brilliant yellow wildflowers bloom against the aging infrastructure of the city’s industrial past. These images, while populated by symbols of decay and obsolescence, telegraph an introspective calm.

While Buffalo is the principle location of the photos included in King, Queen, Knave, other places make appearances. Most notably, a picture Halpern made in the town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, gave me pause. It shows a woman in a sundress standing in a field of flowers. Behind her in the near distance is the Edgar Thompson Works, Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill.1 I pass by this steel mill and garden several times a month. But filtered through Halpern’s lens, this scene looked foreign, almost as if it were from a fairytale. This is perhaps his greatest gift as a photographer—infusing the ordinary with a sense of mystery.

In Halpern’s record of Buffalo, he also seems to be answering an unspoken question: What happens to a city that survives trauma? Factory closures. Jobs sent overseas. Economic collapse. Population loss. All symptoms that can kill a place. But like so many postindustrial cities—Pittsburgh to Cleveland, Detroit to Milwaukee—Buffalo’s fate is not what most would have predicted thirty years ago. It is, however, much like Halpern’s work, continually surprising.

Recommended Reading

“Halpern’s practice emerges from careful, extended observation of the world and a sensitive engagement with the people he photographs.”
—Phil Taylor, Associate Curator at The George Eastman Museum

Over two decades, Gregory Halpern has been photographing in and around his hometown of Buffalo, New York, meticulously crafting the series of photographs that forms his latest monograph. King, Queen, Knave is an idiosyncratic vision of a city amidst its contradictions, defying familiar narratives of post-industrial decline and embracing an enigmatic strain of reality verging on surrealism. Halpern’s mesmerizing sequence unfurls as a stage across which distinct and unpredictable characters appear in and amongst solitary buildings, snowdrifts, and sun-bleached scenes of everyday transcendence.

BUY THE BOOK

I. The Quiet Moments

LAST WEEK, IN THE QUIET MOMENTS BETWEEN grocery shopping and pumping gas, returning library books and mailing packages at the post office, I sat in my car listening to David Marchese’s conversation with poet and novelist Ocean Vuong for the New York Times’ podcast, The Interview. For as long as I have been driving, particularly the many years spent commuting long distances for work, the car has been a welcome (and sometimes unwelcome) isolation booth. It offers a temporary retreat from the noise of the world, and a pause that—for better or worse—leads to introspection and, in darker times, unhealthy rumination. In this case, it was the former.

Marchese, who has been conducting high-profile interviews since his days at New York magazine, always asks thoughtful questions, but Vuong’s openness and sincerity in this interview is what caught me off guard. Not because I view it as foreign for the writer—I’ve heard interviews with him before, I know how disarming he can be—but because it was the right time for me to hear what he had to say. His articulation of the very human experience of what it means to figure out your place in the world and how you go about doing that—whether it’s through conversation, thinking, writing, whatever—left me feeling weirdly validated.

Talking on the occasion of his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, which was published this past Tuesday, Vuong told Marchese that the book was tough to write. Not formally tough, but existentially tough because he viewed the book as deeply personal. “It wasn't clear to me why anyone should read it,” he told Marchese. “If I wrote for myself, I don't think anyone should read it. Whereas, if I wrote to support my family, it was very clear, right?”

That Vuong was making this distinction interested me, the idea that writing done for yourself is different than writing done with a broader audience in mind (i.e., writing to “support my family”). In many ways, of course, it is different. If you keep a journal or diary, that writing is often intended for an audience of one—whether it is your current or future self, it is for you. As someone who has written many personal essays, published a book about shopping malls that mirrors my own life, and is at work on a memoir about masculinity and mental illness, I’ve often questioned my motivations for sharing such personal stories. For example, I derive no joy in writing about living with depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder. But if doing so creates a story that resonates with people, and helps them feel less alone in their own suffering, it may be some of the best work I can do. But that doesn’t mean I have no reservations, or that I don’t second-guess myself. At times, it feels like that is all I do.

One particular exchange between Voung and Marchese speaks not only to these ideas of reason and motivation, but also what it takes to figure out your place in the world:

Marchese: Writing for yourself seemed selfish or hollow?

Vuong: It felt just very neutral, you know? It just felt very limp, where I'm like, ‘Oh, yeah, I'm excited. It's a creative work.’ But when I lost that myth— and it is a myth, right?—that quintessential oldest immigrant son myth, except that [where] other people said I'm going to be a doctor or a lawyer, I said I'm going to be a writer. And even as I tried to betray that Asian stereotype of the immigrant making good, and I thought I would be like this radical writer, I end up doing it.

Marchese: You took a different path, but you did it.

Vuong: It's the same thing, the same goal. And so when I finally got to do what I thought I was doing this whole time, which is like writing on my own terms, it felt really empty to me. But I don't fetishize an identity of writer. To me, this, what we're doing, is the same work. My teaching is the same work. When I give a talk at a university in front of people, it's the same thing.

Marchese: How do you characterize that work?

Vuong: A kind of sincerity of figuring this out. I think that's it. In the Buddhist sutra, it says, engage the phenomena of the world with earnestness. And I've always valued that.

Viewing the work that he does—teaching, speaking, writing—as “figuring it out,” made me smile. In recent weeks, as I have continued building this newsletter into what I want it to be, I’ve thought at length about how place, identity, and home are all things you must perpetually figure out. They are ever-changing. Place is as much about geography as it is a condition. Identity is such a malleable concept, yet such an integral part of what it means to belong. Home takes on new meaning the older you get or the less familiar it becomes. My original name for this newsletter was going to be Everything Changes, because it is such a true phrase. But Homesick is the name that seemed right.

II. Home Away

On Tuesday, Ocean Vuong will be in Pittsburgh for a reading at the Carnegie Lecture Hall, an event that I wish I could attend. But life is funny that way. This week, while Vuong is in my city, I’m in a small town in South Carolina—a home away from home, of sorts—on a retreat with extended family, to say a final goodbye to my mom, whose ashes are being returned to this stretch of the country that she loved so much. I’ll write more on this later—as it is so innately connected to living with grief and continuing to figure out my place in the world—but for now today’s newsletter will have to do.

III. Recommended Reading

“Magnificent . . . In writing this book, Vuong may have joined the ranks of an elite few great novelists.” —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

BUY THE BOOK

This piece contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, a retailer that supports local bookstores. As an affiliate of Bookshop, Homesick earns a small commission when you click through and make a purchase there.

I.

The first time I attempted to write about my life was for my senior seminar in nonfiction during my last semester in the University of Pittsburgh’s writing program. A seminar, in Pitt’s academic vernacular, was really just a semester-long writing workshop, and mine started in the fall of 2001. It was a requirement to graduate, but also one of the classes I had been looking forward to. Not only because it signaled that the end of college was a semester away, but because, after nearly four years in the writing program, I finally felt better prepared to produce good writing. Or at least, what I hoped would be good writing.1

My professor for the workshop was Patsy Sims, a southern writer who had originally made a name for herself as a journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New Orleans States-Item, and for her immersive look at the Ku Klux Klan in her 1978 book, aptly titled The Klan. By the time she was my professor, her tenure at the university was coming to a close, and she would soon go on to direct Goucher College's creative nonfiction program for the next thirteen years.

That semester, Sims assigned two longform writing projects. The first, a journalistic piece of narrative nonfiction, required the greatest time commitment. We were asked to choose a subject—usually a person—to write about by immersing ourselves in their world for several months. I chose to shadow a bagpipe player named Patrick Regan who, at the time, was the first student pursuing a Masters Degree in bagpiping at Carnegie Mellon University. He was also a father of four, who, in-between giving bagpipe lessons in his dining room, was renovating a large Victorian home in Pittsburgh’s Observatory Hill neighborhood. I held sheetrock in place and handed him joint compound while he talked to me from atop a ladder in an attic he had recently gutted to the studs. I accompanied him to recording sessions while he talked with audio engineers about how best to capture the tone of a bagpipe. I sat nearby while he gave lessons to a revolving door of students, young and old. It was a fascinating if not difficult exercise in learning how to observe and record a person’s life before turning it into what you hope will be a good piece of writing.

The second writing project was a personal essay. Right away, I thought I knew what I wanted to write about: dropping out of high school in the middle of junior year and the events that precipitated that decision. I even had the opening scene in mind. I would recreate a hardcore show in Mississaugua, Ontario, at a club called Stardust Billiards, where my band Slowpoke shared a bill with Chokehold, Grade, and Sun Still Burns. I would be on stage, guitar feedback humming, about to play the final chords of a song that always set the crowd in a frenzy. That moment of euphoria would frame the story, help to toggle between the present and the past in a meaningful way. What I didn’t realize at that time, however, was that my seemingly simple idea was not at all simple.

How do you write about the worst time in your life without losing the reader because the story is too bleak? How do you balance light and dark, joy and heartache? How do you articulate deep emotional suffering without becoming too melodramatic or getting mired in sadness? How do you trust your own memory when trauma is known to impair recollection? In other words, how do you keep the story honest and true while always moving forward?

II.

In 2013, I joined the first cohort of writers in the Staunton Farm Foundation’s Writing Away the Stigma Fellowship, a partnership with the Creative Nonfiction Foundation.

As someone who has lived with severe clinical depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) since I was a teenager, I carried my diagnosis as a burden for a long time. I was embarrassed by it. I felt shame about it. I kept it to myself like some kind of horrible secret. For years I tried to write about it, but I could never translate my experience in a way that felt right. It needed to be visceral, urgent, honest, and most of all, worth reading. But as the distance from my diagnosis grew, and my perspective evolved as I became an adult, went to college, started my career, got married, bought a house, and had two sons, the significance of that story——my story——began to reveal itself.

The Writing Away the Stigma Fellowship came along soon after, validating my experience by allowing me to hear the experiences of the other writers in the workshop, and to carve out time to write the story I couldn't before. And while I hate when the words "brave" and "courageous" are associated with writing candidly about mental health, I have always believed the most important thing you can do as a writer is to be honest with yourself when writing personal history. Write about the lows no matter how poorly it paints you. Write about the highs without hyperbole. Write about your faults and weaknesses no matter how much it might hurt to do so, or how uncomfortable it makes you feel.

For the fellowship I wrote an essay called "White Rabbit," which focused on my diagnosis as a teenager and my relationship with my first serious girlfriend, who, at the time, was struggling with her own mental health crises, helped in no part by the omnipresence of her abusive father. Inspired by the type of personal writing in books like Michael Green's Hurry Down Sunshine, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, and Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped, I wrote, revised, and workshopped "White Rabbit" until it started to resemble the story I had attempted to write so many times before. It's by no means a perfect essay. But at the time it was the necessary nudge I needed to get started. Over a decade later, the memoir I am working on about my life at that time is still a work in progress. But now figuring out that project is more a matter of when, not if.

Endnotes

I. Maximum Elimination

LAST MONTH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION delivered a crushing blow to American museums and libraries when it gutted the small federal agency responsible for distributing funds to these institutions nationwide. On Monday, March 31, managers at the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) informed 77 employees, nearly the entire staff, that they were immediately being placed on paid administrative leave. The news arrived less than three weeks after Trump appointed Keith Sonderling, the deputy secretary of labor, as the acting director of IMLS. In response to his new role, Sonderling announced he would lead IMLS "in lock step with this administration to enhance and foster innovation," referencing the executive order that directed the agency, along with six others, be "eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." If you’re confused, yes, Sonderling appears to believe that “innovation” is a synonym for “elimination.” Or at least he wants us to believe he will be taking a nuanced approach to these cuts. I guess even political ghouls have to figure out ways to live with themselves.

In a letter, the American Library Association called Sonderling out, warning the acting director not to cut programs required by law. In 2024, IMLS distributed $266.7 million through various grant programs, critical among them the agency’s Grants to States program that supports regional museums and libraries. To contextualize the impact of these sweeping and indiscriminate cuts, this means programs like student field trips, classes for senior citizens, and access to digital services, may either be severely restricted or entirely dissolved. The IMLS is not ceding defeat, but the challenges are great. Most recently, the IMLS Board of Directors demanded answers about the agency’s future. (Related, but a topic for deeper discussion in the near future, is the Trump administration’s openly hostile anti-intellectualism.)

Given the dire situation these institutions face—institutions that, it’s worth reminding, traditionally receive bipartisan support—we turn to lesson two from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny.

II. Defend Institutions

In the wake of these cuts, Snyder’s second lesson is particularly germane: Defend Institutions. This lesson is framed as follows:

It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.

What stands out most in this lesson, at least for me, is the statement: “Institutions do not protect themselves.” In the decade I spent working at art museums, an experience that had incredible highs and harrowing lows, I learned firsthand about the challenging power dynamics at play behind the scenes. There are so many good people on staff who view their work as stewardship of an institution held in the public trust. These kinds of colleagues are inspiring to work alongside. But there are also leaders, board members, and trustees whose true motives are often questionable, self-serving, or both. For years I’ve worried about the existential threat that museums face from within.1 Today, however, the existential threat comes from a vindictive administration obsessed with sowing chaos.

III. Investing in the Unseen

Museums and libraries can seem like anomalies in a capitalist democracy. These institutions do not produce products that enter a global supply chain, nor do they generate record profits year after year. In fact, most are nonprofits, which means they can be expensive to operate and they often lose money. When they do show a surplus on their ledgers, that money cannot be given to private individuals (i.e., employees). It must be reinvested back into the organization in service of furthering its mission. It also means that these institutions rely on a mix of state and federal funding to support programs and offset operating expenses.

To many, far-right conservative lawmakers among them, this funding may seem like an investment in the unseen. After all, when the takeaway from your trip to the museum or library is a deeper understanding of the Harlem Renaissance or biodiversity or Pop Art or the plight of climate refugees or extinction-level events, it is not easily quantified. There is no physical transaction, no product in hand. But that’s intentional, because these institutions represent a different type of investment—an investment in people.

Museums produce exhibitions that deepen our understanding of the world or challenge our perception of it while rewarding intellectual curiosity. Libraries provide services that enrich our lives through reading, looking, listening, and community. How could these benefits ever be seen as wasteful, inefficient, or signs of bureaucratic bloat? The mission of these institutions is to exercise our minds and emotions while improving our quality of life. In essence, “people over profit,” the inverse of the pro-corporate mindset that Noam Chomsky wrote about in his 1999 book Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, is an unspoken but guiding principle of these institutions.

Billionaires looking at museums and libraries—and the arts and culture sector as a whole—through a capitalist lens is precisely the problem we face.

IV. Recommended Reading

“Timothy Snyder reasons with unparalleled clarity, throwing the past and future into sharp relief. He has written the rare kind of book that can be read in one sitting but will keep you coming back to help regain your bearings.” —Masha Gessen

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

BUY THE BOOK

This piece contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, a retailer that supports local bookstores. As an affiliate of Bookshop, Homesick earns a small commission when you click through and make a purchase there.

A STRANGER WITH A CAMERA is a familiar figure in places where generations of working class families have lived in the shadows of industrial production. Places where you can see chemical processing plants from your backyard, or hear the mechanical thrum of an assembly line from your front porch, or smell sulfur as it burns off in clouds that carry downwind from the steel mill to the park where your children play. Whether that stranger is a documentary filmmaker, Hollywood director, television series showrunner, government film crew, or one of the many photographers or photojournalists who have pointed their camera at people in places where industry has poisoned the land, the pictures are made to communicate socioeconomic distress in simplified terms.

This is particularly true in places where visual representation has consistently been at odds with nuanced reality—from Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh, Toledo, Detroit, and Rockford to small towns throughout Appalachia, which reaches from Southern New York down to Northern Mississippi, a sprawling geographic footprint spanning 423 counties across 13 states. Misrepresentation has dogged these places for generations, doing more harm than good. As author and critic Teju Cole has written, cameras are often their own type of weapon: “When we speak of ‘shooting’ with a camera, we are acknowledging the kinship of photography and violence.”

But there are exceptions.

In Rust Belt, photographer Jack Teemer’s brilliant photo book published posthumously by Nazraeli Press in 2019, two distinct yet uncommon qualities pervade the images: joy and empathy. To portray working class families as more than the collateral damage of globalism was a rarity in the 1980s, especially those living in places like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. But that’s what Teemer, a Baltimore native, was able to do.

In his own words, Teemer’s practice as a photographer was anchored by the concept of humane portraiture:

My photographs are beautiful because I need beauty, and organized because I need organization. It is also a way to entrust a sense of integrity for these people...I feel alive when touching these people’s lives, in the streets and in their personal spaces, particularly the people of a different culture or social class. I am reminded of what is truly important in life—love, empathy, and human relationships.

This approach, treating subjects with an abiding respect not only for them but for their spaces too, is telegraphed in nearly every image in Rust Belt.

Teemer, who died in 1992, was a lesser-known contemporary of photographers like Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, and William Eggleston. His photographs even appeared alongside theirs in the 1987 survey, American Independents: Eighteen Color Photographers, though his work remained under appreciated while he was alive.

“There’s sentimentalism in Teemer’s work that makes him stand out, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons he was overlooked,” Joseph Bellows, his gallerist, has said.

It could be argued, however, that the sentimentalism in Teemer’s photographs is what makes them so profoundly special. He was not in search of the beautifully banal pictures that Stephen Shore makes. Nor was he looking to conjure surrealist images from everyday life as Joel Meyerowitz has done for decades, or transform the ordinary into the poetic as William Eggleston has so often achieved. Teemer’s portraits carry emotional and contextual weight.

In none of the photographer’s images is this more apparent than in a photograph taken in Dayton, Ohio, in 1987, which is pictured above. A red-haired woman with her head thrown back in laughter sits on the steps of a front porch, accompanied by four children, all in different states of play. Your eye is drawn almost instantly to the young girl, who stands ready for her portrait. To the right, a young boy is seen mid-jump. Beside him on the painted floorboards of the porch sits a jump rope and discarded beer can in a cozy. In the center, a barefoot young boy is turned sideways, curious about what his friend or brother or cousin is holding in his hands. Look at this group as a whole, and the body language says everything you need to know about this moment—and others like it—that have most likely played out on this porch. Teemer just happened to be there to document it.

In American culture, the symbolism associated with the front porch can range from safety, shelter, and community to friendship and family. It is more than that too. The porch is a waystation between moments and moods and worlds—a threshold marking before and after or beginning and end. It is, as Michele Norris writes, “a transitional space between the cocoon of home and the cacophony of the outside world.” In the realm of postwar and contemporary art, the porch is what curators and artists would refer to as a “liminal space,” an inflection point between the present and the future, or a physical or metaphorical limbo that evokes feelings of ambiguity or unease.

In Teemer’s photograph, however, all subtext falls away. The porch, crystallized in this image as a place of joy and happiness, is nothing more than a well-worn, well-loved space where this family finds refuge on a hot summer day. And in this moment, that’s all that matters.

Over the last few weeks, the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder has been recommended to me many times. Obviously, the topic is extremely germane to the political chaos and creep toward fascism we are facing here in the United States. In hopes it might ease my growing anxiety, and provide insights and tools to help me move forward with intention, I started reading the book. The more I read, however, I also thought the lessons that Snyder lays out might prove useful to some of you—whether they inspire action, help to focus your thoughts, or place current events in the proper world-historical context.

Before January’s Presidential inauguration, when 45–471 reclaimed power, I was familiar with On Tyranny—I had heard of it, seen it on bookstore shelves. But I had never delved much deeper. In the weeks and months ahead, I’ll be returning to Snyder’s book and its lessons. Not only because I find it critical and relevant to our current political crisis, but because it supports the work of this newsletter too. Homesick is more than an editorial project intended to help us understand the places we come from and how we are shaped by history, memory, and circumstances. It is also a vehicle to help us better understand our place in the world.

1. Do Not Obey in Advance

Snyder’s first lesson is most applicable to the first 100 days of this new administration and our current political moment: Do Not Obey in Advance. This lesson is framed as follows:

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive
government will want, and then offer themselves without being
asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Putting citizen response aside for just a moment, we have already seen the reins of power freely given to 45–47 by a subservient Republican majority in congress that has little interest in challenging him. Self-preservation is at the forefront of all Republican lawmakers’ thoughts, a point that Ed Kilgore outlined in a recent piece for Intelligencer:

So far, there has been a remarkable lack of congressional-Republican pushback to the ongoing Trump-DOGE-OMB seizure of powers reserved for the legislative branch. But this submissiveness has a dual purpose for the president’s faithful servants on Capitol Hill: Yes, it helps them avoid a possible primary challenge backed by Trump and financed by Elon Musk. But it also absolves them of responsibility for executive-branch actions that are unpopular or might be reversed by the courts or by the administration itself.

In other words, it is “smart” but cowardly politics by Republicans, and the type of action that will do nothing to help constituents. But it will also, Republicans hope, do nothing to hurt their chances for re-election. Such sweethearts, right? And it sends a clear message to the MAGA faithful, even if they don’t want to hear it just yet: Republicans aren’t going to save you now, and Republicans aren’t going to save you later. Of course, such dereliction of duty was already confirmed by the GOP recommendation, earlier this month, to avoid convening town halls. Gross and shameful politics for a gross and shameful moment in American history.

As we enter the third month of this administration, the response by Democrats—which has, until very recently, been deeply frustrating and painfully anemic—is finally showing small hints of life. Namely, in the form of recent town halls convened by Summer Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders.

As for the individuals who Snyder says “will think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked,” America’s billionaire class wasted no time in currying favor with 45–47 when it donated millions to his inauguration festivities. According to Americans for Tax Fairness, donations looked like this:

Amazon–founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos–has pledged $2 million to the inaugural, while Meta (Facebook)–brainchild of billionaire Mark Zuckerberg–will give $1 million. General Motors, Google, and Microsoft have each also offered $1 million. Apple CEO and billionaire Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million, as will billionaire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and billionaire hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin.

The cryptocurrency industry–hoping to avoid more rigorous regulation–made its first big foray into politics in last year’s campaigns. This year, the CEO of a crypto firm tops the list of inauguration donors with a $5 million contribution of its own form of digital cash.

In our next close reading of Snyder’s On Tyranny, we’ll look at lesson two: Defend Institutions. In the meantime, I’m putting together a reading list of books in the same vein as Snyder’s. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

Recommended Reading

“Timothy Snyder reasons with unparalleled clarity, throwing the past and future into sharp relief. He has written the rare kind of book that can be read in one sitting but will keep you coming back to help regain your bearings.” —Masha Gessen

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

BUY THE BOOK

Disclosure

Homesick is an affiliate of Bookshop.org, whose mission supports independent bookshops around the world, and we may earn a commission when you buy the books linked in our newsletter. To learn more about our curated reading lists, please visit our shop.

Endnotes

Twenty years ago, I called Harvey Pekar on the phone. I wanted to ask if he would write an essay for an anthology that I was editing called Fame & Misfortune. I was 28 and doggedly determined to do something. Establish myself. Become someone. The book, which centered on the perils of celebrity, was going to be published the following year via Poison Control, the small press that I ran out of my house. Pekar’s combative relationship with fame—and the fact that he had flirted with it for most of his adult life—seemed a perfect fit.

Pekar, for those not familiar, was a writer, jazz critic, and creator of the autobiographical underground comic book American Splendor, which debuted in 1976 and carried the tagline “From off the streets of Cleveland.”1 Pekar was a proud resident of Cleveland Heights, where he lived with his third wife, Joyce Brabner, a political writer and comics editor. When he died in 2010, at the age of 70, Pekar left behind a library of comics he created over his more than thirty-year career. Equally important to his personal mythos was what Pekar did during the day: he worked full time as a file clerk at the VA, a steady job that afforded him the freedom to moonlight as a comics creator.

Comics is a visual medium, which makes Pekar’s place in comics history distinctive. He couldn’t draw. Instead, he relied on a revolving roster of cartoonists to help realize his stories. Some worked from stick figure drawings and dialogue he provided, others worked from short manuscripts or conversations with Pekar. His most frequent collaborators over the years were R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Spain Rodriguez, Joe Zabel, Gerry Shamray, Frank Stack, Mark Zingarelli, and Joe Sacco. In the later decades of his career, Pekar partnered with a who’s who of independent cartoonists including Alison Bechdel, Gilbert Hernandez, Eddie Campbell, David Collier, Drew Friedman, Ho Che Anderson, and the late Ed Piskor.

This is probably what I admired most about Pekar. He didn’t let his inability to draw stop him from creating the pioneering comics that he envisioned in his head. As a writer who has loved comics and illustration my whole life, but who is hopelessly untalented when it comes to drawing, Pekar’s example has always inspired me. I still have time to write my own comic, I often think to myself. Harvey did it.

As Pekar described it, American Splendor was “autobiography written as it’s happening. The theme is about staying alive, getting a job, finding a mate, having a place to live, finding a creative outlet. Life is a war of attrition. You have to stay active on all fronts. It’s one thing after another. I’ve tried to control a chaotic universe. And it’s a losing battle. But I can’t let go. I’ve tried, but I can’t.”

I’d gotten Pekar’s number from a man who used to book him for speaking engagements. “Harvey’s real cool,” he told me. “Just give him a call.” So I did. The phone rang a few times, then Harvey picked up. His voice, scratchy and distinct, was recognizable from his days on Letterman, where his many appearances between 1986 and 1994 always left the show in total disarray.2 The only difference with this version of Pekar was the passage of time: he sounded like himself, but older.

Harvey listened patiently to my elevator pitch. I explained that this anthology, the second published by the small press I had founded a year earlier, was using essays, photography, and illustration to look at the cult of celebrity and the nation’s absorption in media culture, the subjective lens of the media, and celebrity worship. It was ambitious given my time and money constraints, not to mention my grand plans for who would be involved, how the book would be designed, and where it would be printed.

I was nervous, stumbled on my words, and probably sounded a bit manic. When I finished explaining the book, and what I was looking for in an essay, Harvey asked a few questions. How many words? What’s the deadline? He also told me the book sounded “real interesting.” Then he said: “What’s it pay?” That’s when my stomach dropped. I knew he would—and should—ask about payment. But that didn’t mean I was prepared to sound eloquent in my response. I think naive, 28-year-old me hoped he might not bring it up.

At the time, I had no money. Every submission I received was paid back in copies of books and zines, or by putting contributors in touch with editors and art directors I knew, people who could afford to pay them, however meager the money. But Harvey didn’t need that. He had an outlet for his work, a means of distributing his stories and ideas. That year alone, he had published The Quitter, an autobiographical graphic novel about his upbringing as the son of Jewish immigrants, and illustrated by veteran comic book artist Dean Haspiel. Best of American Splendor, an anthology of his work spanning the last twenty-five years, was also released.

“I’m paying for this book out of my own pocket,” I admitted to Harvey. “Which means my budget is almost non-existent.”

I was too embarrassed to tell him I would be printing the book after hours at the hospital where I worked at the time. And that I would most likely be sewing the binding by hand with my wife, and enlisting any willing friends to help as well. I knew that he, more than most, understood the challenges of independent publishing, but I felt so small time that I didn’t want to reveal the threadbare nature of my budding enterprise.

After admitting there was no budget, I waited for him to thank me for wasting his time. “I need to make some dough,” he said, before pausing. It seemed like he was mulling over whether he could handle doing one more piece of writing for free in his life. “Yeah, I need to at least make some dough, a few hundred bucks.” I told him I would see if I could get some cash together and, if so, I would call him back. I never got the cash.

When I think about this phone call, I cringe. I wonder if my request insulted him, even though he didn’t seem the least bit offended. To him, it was probably another phone call, one of many he fielded that day from his home in Cleveland Heights. But I wish I could have made it work.

In the intervening years, Pekar has become a hero of mine. At that time, however, I knew him more from Paul Giamatti’s portrayal in the film version of American Splendor (2003) and his Letterman appearances than his actual writing. Since then I’ve pored over his work, collected the original self-published issues of American Splendor, and even tracked down most of the title’s weird run on Vertigo, DC’s alt imprint. Occasionally I discover little-known stories by Pekar in obscure anthologies and one-shot comics I turn up in dollar bins at the local comic shop.

The Fame & Misfortune anthology remains unfinished, two decades later. And in that manuscript wasting away on an aging hard drive, there is no contribution from Harvey Pekar.

Endnotes

I. The Little-Death

Is it normal to be filled with dread before the day begins? Is permanent panic sustainable as a state of being? Are anxiety and uncertainty the new baselines? These are questions I’ve asked myself repeatedly over the last month. But these are also questions that remain answered. That’s because fear, unmediated, can be an insidious emotion. Rooting it out—or just keeping it at arm’s length—is not simple. But something occurred to me recently about the nature of fear.

To live with fear is different than living in fear. When you live with fear, that usually means it is a familiar emotion—a feeling you have managed for months, years, or even decades. For example, if you suffer from panic attacks, that fear and the conditions where it flourishes are ingrained from past episodes. To live in fear is far more immediate. Cause and effect are laid bare. For example, people trapped in war zones live in fear of being killed.

As much as I do not want to invoke Trump’s name, or recount the fuckery of his cult-like goons and loyalists, it is unavoidable at this point. As the hate and chaos politics of MAGA are center stage again, I have had to work hard to manage my anxiety while trying to channel it in a constructive direction. Writing is my answer for now.

II. There Will Be Nothing

The writing of Frank Herbert, sci-fi godhead and author of Dune (1965), has come to mind many times in recent weeks. A famous passage from the landmark novel is of particular interest—especially when I think of it in relation to anxiety and uncertainty:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

In film, this passage has made for memorable and intense performances. First with Kyle MacLachlan’s portrayal of Paul Atreides in David Lynch’s Dune (1984), where he acts opposite of Siân Phillips’ Gaius Helen Mohiam, who is a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother.1 With his right hand inside an ornately carved wooden box, Paul must overcome his basic instincts and endure the pain being conjured by the Reverend Mother while she holds a poison needle at his neck. This is a test. Can intellect be called on to eclipse physical pain. When the pain becomes unbearable, Paul begins reciting the words, prayer-like, in his head: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.” Visions of his hand, the flesh burning, flash on screen, as do the amber-colored sands of Arrakis, a planet he has yet to visit. When he cries out “the pain,” the Reverend Mother acknowledges he has endured enough. When he removes his hand from the box, it is unscathed.

This same scene was recreated in director Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation of the novel. This time, Timothée Chalamet portrays Paul Atreides opposite Charlotte Rampling as Reverend Mother Mohiam. But there’s one substantive change. Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), Paul’s mother, recites this passage as she stands guard outside the chamber where her son is being tested. Visibly shaken, she whispers “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer,” to quiet her welling panic. But she stumbles on the words and must begin again. As she trembles and fights back tears, she takes a deep breath to steady herself, and her words become clear and calm. In the chamber, Paul appears buoyed by his mother’s meditative recitation, though he cannot hear her. Before the Reverend Mother tells him he can remove his hand from the box, the image of a charred silhouette of his hand, as if carved from driftwood, rises totem-like from the sands of Arrakis.

But what is the lesson here? What, if anything, can be gleaned from this passage in the book or its cinematic counterparts? Given our current creep toward fascism, and my concerns about managing anxiety amid social and political uncertainty, it got me wondering about the Dune auteur’s politics.

Herbert’s personal politics were not without flaw—or contradiction. He was a Republican and an environmentalist with Libertarian leanings. He worked as a speechwriter for several Republicans, including Senator Guy Cordon, a supporter of Joseph McCarthy’s misdirected crusade to root out suspected communists.2 He considered Nixon to be a far more effective president than Kennedy, and believed that the Watergate scandal unwittingly taught Americans an important lesson: do not trust the government. He praised Reagan’s pro-family and bootstrap individualism stances, though he disagreed with his foreign policy. In Chapterhouse: Dune (1985), the final novel published before his death from cancer the following year, Herbert offered a no-bullshit definition of politics in two sentences: “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”

III. Coda

As we conclude, let’s put on our editor caps. I like Herbert’s writing in this passage, but if I want to rely on it in a moment of quiet meditation, it will need punched up. See my marks below:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will and permit it to pass over me and through me. And wWhen it hais gone, past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Oonly be meI will remain.

If I sent this back as a Word document with my edits tracked, our famous author would ask that I be removed from the project. But let’s at least see how it reads:

I must face my fear and permit it to pass. When it is gone there will only be me.

Obviously, I’ve ruined the lyricism of Herbert’s writing. And maybe even given it more of a “Dance like nobody’s watching” or “Live. Laugh. Love.” vibe, but it’s with the best intentions.

Endnotes

I. Persistence

The other morning I woke up with a familiar saying stuck in my head: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” It’s a phrase I’ve heard a million times, the kind that loses its power and means almost nothing the more it is repeated. But for days I had been ruminating on the idea of persistence, and how important a trait it has been throughout my life, which is why I think the phrase probably took up residence with all the other noise in my head.

The origin of this line is open to debate, but it is most often attributed to a poem by writer William Edward Hickson, which appeared in his book The Singing Master (1836), and contains the lines:

‘Tis a lesson you should heed—
Try again;
If at first you don’t succeed,
Try again.

I went down this rabbit hole because I was thinking of persistence and this proverb in relation to this newsletter. Last year, when I left my art museum job of ten years to start an independent editorial practice, I had also planned to write a weekly newsletter (i.e., the newsletter you are currently reading). But it turns out running your own business is a lot of work that requires long days and weird hours, and I wasn’t able to dedicate the time to Homesick that I had originally planned. So after sending out a half dozen newsletters last year, I decided to pause billing and stop publishing until I could establish a better schedule and give more time to the project.

That pause lasted seven months. And while my published output ground to a halt, it wasn’t for lack of trying. I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. Being persistent has always been one of my greatest strengths. Whatever I lack in intelligence or talent, I make up for by sheer force of will. This newsletter is no exception.

Sixty-seven drafts. That’s the number of partially written newsletters in my Substack queue. That means if I had finished writing those pieces, and properly published them, I would have well exceeded my goal of fifty-two newsletters in 2024. It also means I would have started 2025 with a strong archive to build on. Instead, it is the second week of February, and I am firing this newsletter machine up to make sure everything still works.

II. Self-Sabotage

Before learning that William Edward Hickson most likely coined the “Try Again” proverb, my research informed me that misanthropic barfly W.C. Fields may have in fact been the author. Legend has it that, during a commencement address at a public school, Fields doled out a surlier take on Hickson’s optimistic verse:

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.

Of course, I like Fields’ version better. But that’s probably because it better aligns with my tendency to self-sabotage. “Being a fool about it” is almost too perfect a way to describe the negative self-talk of my inner critic. I am my own worst enemy—a saboteur convinced that I produce nothing of value. But I know that isn’t true, particularly as it relates to my writing. I just need to remember that.

III. Starting Over

I’ve hit the reset button on this newsletter. In an effort to limit mental blocks while encouraging experimentation, I had to. Which is just to say, I’ve removed the editorial framework of place, identity, and home because it just wasn’t helping me. If you visit the About page, you’ll see that I’ve expanded the scope of the newsletter to be more reflective of my many interests as a writer. I will still be publishing shortform and longform writing, as well as interviews, but I’m also interested in writing reviews, curating reading lists, and compiling resource posts to help offset the fear, chaos, and confusion of our current political moment.

IV. Subscriber Update

Thank you all for your early support of the newsletter, and for sticking around. Billing will remain paused for all of February, but will resume a month from today on Sunday, March 9. If you would like to opt out, I totally understand. Otherwise, I’m looking forward to sharing a host of new stories in the weeks and months ahead.

Last month, when the exhibition LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it prompted me to think about when I first encountered Frazier’s photography. It must have been around 2012 or so, when she was featured in that year’s Whitney Biennial. I remember feeling both shocked and exhilarated. I couldn’t believe that someone from Braddock, an old mill town less than five miles away from my own home, was making such thoughtful, self-aware, and consequential work. Not because it couldn’t happen, of course, but because, at the time, the only work being made about Braddock was being done by outsiders: traveling photographers making ruin-porn inflected pictures, advertising executives from Levi’s looking to use the town as a backdrop for their Walt Whitman-inspired ‘Go Forth’ campaign, and news outlets looking to document the political rise of John Fetterman, who was halfway through his tenure as mayor at the time.

Other than the work of independent filmmaker Tony Buba, who has spent more than four decades chronicling Braddock—documenting the dissolution of the working class after the boom years of the early 20th century—honest and personal depictions of what it meant to be born and raised in Braddock did not exist. Especially not the experience of what it meant to come of age as a Black woman in a community with no jobs, no economy, and catastrophic population loss. Until Frazier willed her story into being, that is.

In her essay in the opening pages of the exhibition catalogue for Monuments of Solidarity, the Braddock-born, Chicago-based artist-activist wastes no time in reminding us about the significance of where she is from and how it has guided her work these last two decades:

In 1982 I was born by the ancient Monongahela River in Talbot Towers, an Allegheny County public housing project in a neighborhood known as “the Bottom” in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Shaped by the steel industry and the legacy of the nineteenth-century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, it is home to his first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Steel Works (1875), and his first library, the Braddock Carnegie Library (1889).

To imagine Frazier’s photographs without envisioning the postindustrial expanse of Braddock is nearly impossible. It is, after all, the catalyst for all of her work that has followed. In The Notion of Family, Frazier’s seminal monograph published by Aperture in 2014, Braddock is as much a character as her mother, Cynthia, or her grandmother Ruby. Some might even argue that the town is more of a character than those in her family, if for no other reason than Braddock’s looming, pervasive, and inescapable presence in each image. Which is why Frazier’s raw and honest account of her family’s life in the shadow of the Edgar Thompson Steel Works is so moving. It places, side by side, sweet and intimate pictures of domestic life—often interior moments inside the family home—alongside exterior pictures of an economically devastated town weathering the fallout of deindustrialization.

As Frazier continues in her introductory essay from Monuments of Solidarity, she reiterates the humanistic approach that has been evident in so much of her work—how the empathetic lens of her camera has provided a North Star:

From the Steel Valley, along the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio rivers to the Flint River in “Vehicle City,” Flint, Michigan; from historical mineshafts in the Borinage, Belgium, to a historic labor union in Lordstown, Ohio; and from community health workers in Baltimore, Maryland, to a labor leader and civil rights activist in California’s Central Valley, I’ve used my camera as a compass to direct a pathway toward the illuminated truth of the indomitable spirit of working-class families and communities in the twenty-first century.

As I read Monuments of Solidarity, which I’m still working my way through—I hope to see the exhibition in person before its closes on September 7—the following passage from Frazier’s essay struck me because of its practical honesty:

For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist—one photograph at a time, one photo-essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time—historical erasure and historical amnesia.

Erasure and amnesia are so ingrained in our histories—whether personal or familial, local or national—that it is easy to assume your given generation is the first to experience or truly understand hardship or loss or injustice. But maybe that is Frazier’s point. For history to become more than memory, creating an honest record of our lives—whether it’s through photography, writing, oral history, etc.—is the best we can do.

On Saturday, I sat in a darkened theater at Carnegie Museum of Art watching a 16mm print of Style Wars, the seminal documentary by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant about the early days of New York’s hip-hop scene and its exploding culture of graffiti writers—future legends like Taki 183, Stay High 149, Dondi, Seen, Futura, Revolt, Zephyr, and so many more. I tried to recall when I had first seen the film. It debuted on PBS in 1984, when I was seven years old, so I know it wasn’t then. It must have been in 1991 or 1992, on VHS tape, around the same time I started writing graffiti.

As far as I was concerned, though, Style Wars was never Chalfant’s most influential work. For me, it was and always will be Spraycan Art, his 1986 book with James Prigoff that documented graffiti culture in America and around the world.1 I vividly remember buying the only copy on the shelves at the B. Dalton in Monroeville Mall. It would have been around 1992. When I got home I ran to my bedroom and pored over the pages. The book was not even a decade old at that point, but still it felt like stumbling upon some sacred text in a time capsule.

Not only did Spraycan Art offer a window into the graffiti culture in cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and more, it also included photographs taken in Pittsburgh—my hometown that I often wrote off as boring and behind the times—which blew my mind. Sure, Pittsburgh had to share a page2 with Cleveland, but still, we were represented. And representation matters—especially to a 14-year-old kid who had gone from sociable honor-roll student to becoming increasingly withdrawn from family and friends.3

What appealed to me about graffiti was its existence as a coded language. In the city, when I noticed Serg or Force marker tags on yellow traffic boxes, a little adrenaline rush kicked in. While I had yet to meet either writer, I knew them in the sense you know an author or musician: the work spoke for them. Handstyles fascinated me. Admittedly, I had little interest in painting pieces, probably because I’m not adept at drawing. But I did love bombing with markers, spraycans, shoe polish, paint pens, and any other tools that successfully marked surfaces. The mix of secrecy and destruction was addictive—I became obsessed.

In 2005, I wrote a cover story for the Pittsburgh City Paper called “Writers’ Bloc: Pittsburgh’s Graffiti Elite Confess their Obsession with Illegal Art.” The article looked at the past 25 years of graffiti in the city, from 1980 to 2005, and featured as-told-to narratives from nearly a dozen writers. Some were graffiti writers I used to go bombing with, others were either acquaintances or writers I never met. I also interviewed Henry as a sidebar for the piece, which is when I learned he was a Pittsburgh native.4 When we talked on the phone, I asked if he believes graffiti becomes an obsession.5

“It clearly takes over a person’s life,” he said. “It’s the combination of the hit of seeing your piece out there like that, and the knowledge that if you don’t keep doing it you won’t get anywhere. You can’t just do a piece and say, ‘Hey, I’m a writer,’ and be done with it, because it won’t be long and it’s all gone and you’re nobody.”

Re-reading this quote almost twenty years later, it reminds me that the Nobody vs. Somebody aspect of writing graffiti has always been a major draw. I know it was for me. While only a few of my friends and I usually painted together, knowing that a larger world of graffiti writers existed often gave us the sense of being part of something bigger.

After the screening and panel discussion, I introduced myself to Henry, and mentioned our interview as an icebreaker. “Wow,” he said. ”That was a long time ago.” We talked briefly and he signed a 228 postal label for me (I forgot my copy of Spraycan Art). At the urging of my wife Michelle, I asked if we could have our photo taken together, and he humored me.

The importance of Henry’s photographs in my life is difficult to quantify. What I do know is that when I was slipping into the darkness of depression my freshman year of high school, graffiti was one of the very few beacons that I had.

On the day after the Style Wars screening, I showed my library of graffiti books to my son Nico, whose already attended graffiti workshops at the Carrie Furnace, and has an interest in the subject. After flipping through the pages of Subway Art and Spraycan Art, where I pointed out my favorite photos, he ran inside for his sketchbook and markers.

Endnotes

I.

Last Thursday, I took a road trip to Philadelphia. My friend and brother-in-law, Jeff, had an extra ticket to a show at the First Unitarian Church and asked if I’d like to go. I knew the venue well, at least in name. For years, touring bands had been traveling from Cleveland to Philadelphia en route to New York, altogether skipping Pittsburgh, which always felt like a knock on the city. The ticket was for Slothrust, a jazz/grunge three-piece from Boston who were on tour to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their album Of Course You Do. Admittedly, I’d never heard of them, and I resisted my initial impulse to dismiss them based on their name1. Instead, I listened to some of their back catalog and my interest was piqued. When Jeff let me hear the band’s cover of the Ginuwine song “Pony,” I became weirdly fascinated. Sludgy bass beneath clean, jazzy chord progressions and melodic vocals, I was sold. And given the amorphous dread that’s consumed me the last fews months, it seemed foolish not to go. I told Jeff I was in.

Despite living in Pennsylvania my whole life, I’ve somehow never taken a proper trip to Philadelphia. The closest I ever came was back in 2003 when I booked an Amtrak train from Pittsburgh to New York to attend a conference at the Javits Center. I was working as an editor for a medical journal at the time and had been asked to staff the organization’s booth on the trade show floor. The idea of talking to conference attendees all day triggered my anxiety, but I was still looking forward to getting some personal writing done on the train to New York. Unfortunately, heavy rains the day before had flooded the tracks between Harrisburg and Philadelphia, and the train was unable to pass. Amtrak chartered Greyhound buses as a workaround, which means I traded a spacious passenger car for a cramped bus seat until we reached the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, where I only had an hour to kill before boarding a train headed for Grand Central—not exactly a surplus of time to check out what the city had to offer.

Last week’s trip was different. Ten hours in the car from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and back again, which left about six hours in Philly. More than enough time for Jeff and me to catch up on life during the drive—i.e., talk of music, parenting, getting old, the pros and cons of edibles, existential dread, etc.—and a solid block of time in the city. After getting parked in a lot on Chestnut Street, a few blocks from the Liberty Bell, I broke the news to Jeff about all the human feces I noticed in the empty parking space next to our car.

“Welcome to Philadelphia,” I said, arms spread wide as if presenting a gift.

“At least the shit’s all in one place,” Jeff said. “Otherwise it would be chaos.”

II.

After a short walk, we found a bar on South 2nd Street in Old City to order food and have a couple beers. It was hot, over 80 degrees, but a set of French doors that opened onto the street offered an occasional breeze. By the time our food arrived we were already two drinks deep and a little buzzed.

What I’ve always liked about Jeff is his openness to the world around him. He’s just always seemed comfortable in his own skin. It’s a disposition I envy because it’s taken me most of my life to reach a mental space remotely similar. He never appears to overthink things, but he’s not reckless either. My default tendency is self-consciousness and rumination, which, while the severity of it has improved over the years, still dogs me to this day. To be someone with an easiness about them would be nice. But I’m not wired for that. At least not yet. The older I get, however, it’s a state of being that feels more within reach.

Out on the street in Old City, a little more buzzed than before, we stumbled upon The Book Trader, an incredible used book shop with two overflowing floors. I wandered the aisles, happy, looking at novels and photo books and old pulp paperbacks. Jeff and I crossed paths a couple times, but remained trancelike in our own worlds. Upstairs I saw a copy of Hilton Als’ White Girls teetering atop a stack of books yet to be shelved. I reached for the book and cracked it open to the title page. It was signed in Sharpie but with no inscription. In my slightly altered state, I interpreted my discovery as a message from the universe.

Hilton Als intended this book for some stranger in the future, I thought. Maybe I’m that stranger?

After buying the book at the front counter, where the shop cat brushed against the back of my legs, I met Jeff outside. We wandered down narrow cobblestone side streets, which reminded me of past travels to New York and even Amsterdam. We wound our way, ever so slowly, toward the venue—slipping in and out of pubs and bars as we went.

Travel is most often a luxury of the affluent. Aside from our family’s summer pilgrimage each year to Michigan’s lower peninsula, where we disengage from the larger world for as long as we’re able, our lives are firmly rooted in the realities of Western Pennsylvania. Partly by choice, but also very much by economic circumstance. In many ways, idle status in my birthplace all these years inspired one of the many meanings behind the name of this newsletter. To be homesick can mean to miss the place you come from, sure. But it also speaks to my frustration with Pittsburgh. At times, I am just sick of living in this city.

III.

It was just before 9 o’clock when we got to the First Unitarian Church for the show. The basement was sweltering hot. Four slow-moving ceiling fans did little more than recirculate a sour potpourri of sweat, body odor, and weed smoke. Jeff and I caught three songs from openers Weakened Friends, an indie rock trio from Portland, Maine, that counts married couple Sonia Sturino (vocals/guitar) and Annie Hoffman (bass), and drummer Adam Hand, among its members.

“We’re Weakened Friends,” Sturino reminded the crowd after their second-to-last song. “It’s the worst band name. If anyone has a better idea please let us know.”

I looked over at Jeff and laughed. On the drive he told me how much he liked the band’s name.

By the time Slothrust took the stage it was after 9 o’clock. Still buzzed from the additional drinks we had during our purposefully slow walk to the venue, I was feeling good. Tired but happy. A distorted guitar chord struck by Leah Wellbaum, the band’s vocalist and guitar player, hung hypnotically in the air.

Behind us a brief commotion broke out as the set started. A man holding a beer near the merch table had blacked out and fallen facedown on the ground, blood streaming from his nose after hitting the cement floor. The crowd parted and workers from the venue tended to him. They attempted to have the man sit in a folding chair but he blacked out again.

Unaware, the band worked through its setlist, playing one song after another from the album Of Course You Do, with most of the crowd singing along. Released in 2014, the band and album were never on my radar. My sons were eight and four at the time—I was living in a much different world that year. Founding members Wellbaum and Will Gorin (drums), I later read, had been playing together since their days at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 2000s, and bassist2 Annie Hoffman of Weakened Friends and Rare Signals has been rounding out the trio on this tour. Hearing the band live after only briefly familiarizing myself with their catalog was profound in the way that only new music can be. It resonated with me in ways, I imagined, that most of the people around me had already experienced a decade earlier.

The fallen man, now lying on his back, head propped up in someone’s lap, was conscious again, drinking sips of water as an employee wearing rubber medical gloves used paper towels to soak up the blood from the floor. Not long after, two paramedics arrived and helped the man to his feet and out of the venue. The crowd closed the gap, as if nothing had ever happened, singing along to every chorus.

Endnotes

To begin with Harry Crews make sense. After all, reading the Georgia native’s 1978 memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, is what prompted me to write Homesick. It helped me understand that personal history, while often viewed through the saccharine sweet lens of nostalgia, is most honestly written about when it includes the bitter parts we tend to hide away. Love tempered by heartache; joy informed by sorrow; peace attained through adversity; and the list goes on.

As Casey Cep wrote in a March 2022 article in the New Yorker, Crews’s memoir “animates nostalgia and then annihilates it.” I love this description. At its best, all good memoir writing should do this. Draw you in with experiences familiar and even universal, then upend that narrative with unexpected personal history.

In Crews’ writing, personal history and place are intertwined in such a profound way that, when written staggeringly well, as Crews does, a distinct and unshakeable voice emerges. This newsletter, in many ways, is about finding that voice. Not only for myself, but also in the work of others. Which is why Crews, with all his complexities and contradictions and raw abilities, is as good a starting point as any.

A harrowing but achingly beautiful account of growing up in the American South, specifically the first six years of his life, Crews, who died in 2012, had an intimate understanding of narrative voice and its significance. He knew how to translate the rich and lived-in worlds of his childhood in language both lyrical and profound. Nowhere is that more evident than in passages like this from the opening pages of A Childhood:

I had already learned—without knowing I’d learned it—that every single thing in the world was full of mystery and awesome power. And it was only by right ways of doing things—ritual ways—that kept any of us safe. Making stories about them was not so that we could understand them but so that we could live with them.

The phrase “live with them”—the stories, that is—infers more than one meaning. On one hand, Crews is talking about tolerance. To what degree can we tolerate the weight of our personal stories—both good and bad—and how much do we allow those stories to shape and define or even limit us. On the other hand, he is talking about how stories travel with us through our lives, and the ways in which we use them to explain ourselves or galvanize beliefs or mark time or reinforce our identities.

Not intended as a close reading of A Childhood, today’s newsletter is instead a point of departure for future issues of Homesick. (A close reading, however, would be great for a future edition.)

“To enter this book is to enter another world,” Tobias Wolff writes in the foreword to the Penguin Classics edition of A Childhood. “Though set in an American state—Georgia—in a time not too distant from our own—the first half of the twentieth century—any temptation to feel ourselves on familiar ground is continually revealed as illusion.”

Upgrade to paid

Homesick is free. But it is also reader-supported. If you can afford to buy a subscription, I hope you will. Your contribution keeps the lights on.

All you can hope for, as a writer, is to build a world entirely your own. A place that you, and only you, are capable of rendering. Whether in truth or fiction, this act of creation is your fingerprint.

When I think of Pittsburgh, my own place of origin, arguably the largest, most metropolitan city in Northern Appalachia, but a city and region still plagued by income disparity, class division, racism, good-old-boy politics, and a growing divide between urban and rural populations, I consider how perceptions, identities, and beliefs have been shaped by voices past and present.

To claim authorship of a place is to assume a certain type of ownership over a larger narrative. And the concept of authorship is of course not limited to writers. In the dispatches, essays, and interviews published here in Homesick in the weeks and months ahead, the authorship of artists, filmmakers, historians, musicians, photographers, and more will be examined with the intention to cull insight or practical advice or a moment of clarity we never saw coming. At least, that’s my hope.