Description
“No place is a place until it has had a poet,” said the writer. A farmer might express the same sentiment: No place is a place until it has received my plow. This 32-page pamphlet examines what it means for a place—particularly a small place—to be a place. How much history and culture must happen before a community shares an idea about what it means to be from somewhere?
Framed in letters to my cousin who has remained to farm on the family’s ancestral land despite so many people leaving. I compare the small town of Umbarger, Texas, to Dublin in 1900 when the likes of James Joyce and William Butler Yeats were forging Ireland’s consciousness of itself. What fruitful inspirations can be derived from comparing the two communities?