You may know I'm back in school (pursuing my MFA through a low-residency graduate program at Lesley University's School of Art and Design.) 

When I started the program I knew a good deal about myself and the work I had been creating, but I wasn't as certain about a direction for future work, or even for the next project. I'll spare you the lengthy description and play-by-play that includes the many critical theory books and readings, several discussions with my advisor and a number of critiques of my existing work, and skip to the part where the picture eventually became less muddy.

I was born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1973. My dad was in the Air Force, so we moved a lot, but always in the South. We ended up in San Antonio, Texas where my folks divorced, and my sister and I stayed with my mom in Texas. In 1998, my grandfather died, and my mom and step-dad moved back to Mississippi to help my grandmother. 

Most of our family is still in Mississippi and Alabama, and throughout my life we've gone back to visit regularly. My sister moved back nearly 20 years ago, and last year my dad, having retired from the Air Force, moved back, too. Of the blood relatives, in the somewhat immediate family, as in parents, grandparents, cousins, second cousins, aunts and uncles and one nephew, only two of us--my cousin Amber and myself-have not moved back.

I've been saying for a while now that I have business with the South.

I've written posts about it--the memories of growing up there, great times with family and friends, camping, roller skating, trips to Shipley Donuts, adding Miss before women's names, running around barefoot. My southern heritage runs deep, and the way I was raised comes from my Southern family. I find myself conflicted, though, because I grew up mostly in Texas, in San Antonio, a large military town--giant compared to Columbus or any other town I'd ever been in up to that point.

I went to college, developed opinions and perspectives different from my parents, began to vote differently and began to see Columbus, Mississippi, Alabama, and my family differently. 

So much has changed since I was just a girl spending summers and occasional Christmases there. The places I go when we visit now are limited to the areas right around my parent's house. Mostly, we stay home and play games, watch a little T.V., eat a lot and try to make up for the months apart. I don't even know my way around town anymore. I don't know any new people--just the ones who have remained friends with my grandmother and mom over the years, and who I see occasionally if they drop by the house while I am in town.

I'm both from there and not from there--a stranger in my own hometown. I have a confused understanding of what it means to be from there in the 70s and what it means to live there now. My mental depiction of Columbus and of Mississippi, in general, is a distorted and surreal image combining past and present, stories and photographs, events I've seen in the news or heard from family members. My truths and fictions are mixed up. Mississippi's past, the South's past and my own past are bound together: the beauty, the strangeness, the tragedies and the grace. 

I read an article recently called Signs of Return: Photography as History in the U.S. South by Grace Elizabeth Hale. By way of discussing photographers who have done much or all of their work in the South, she meditates on the idea of "the return," which she defines as going back "to a place that grounds you."

She continues:

     It means rooting yourself in a geography and a community. It means to say or put or send or feel or give back your attention

     or your presence or your affection or your verdict. It means to yield or to make. 

This is what I plan to do over the next year or two and maybe longer...however long it takes I guess. I am blessed beyond understanding that my grandmother is still alive. She lives in Columbus in the home she made with my mom and dad. The idea of exploring the South and all that it conures for me and others is a monster of an intention, so I'm beginning by going to the most immediate source of my roots, my own mother and grandmother. I'll start there and work my way out.

I guess I could have simply explained that I'm feeling called to rediscover the place I still call home, though I haven't lived there in decades.

The South is a place full of proof of the past, from slavery and the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement. It's a flawed character that haunted many of my favorite authors and produced a genre of art and literature called Southern Gothic. From William Faulkner to Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty to Walker Percy, Southern writers have been drawn to the dark and twisted history of the South and its effects on the people who call it home. In photography, artists like Emmet Gowin, Clarence John Laughlin and Sally Mann, too, have found inspiration for their work in a land filled with woods and swamps and ghosts.

I guess it's been haunting me, too.