Searching for Home

Fiction writers have their themes, even if those themes are sometimes unbeknownst to them. I, of course, am no exception. In the last couple of years I have seen my work gravitate toward a central theme that has been driven by my own preoccupation. My work these days centers around the idea of home. My stories tend to address the following questions: What is "home" in a rapidly changing world? What is "home" to a person who has returned after many years elsewhere? What is "home" to someone living between or among cultures?

Of course, much of this meditation comes from the fact that I can no longer recognize where I grew up. Fields I once roamed have become subdivisions. Creeks where I fished for crawdads have been turned to concrete. The empty highway I biked down to get to a favorite fishing hole is now a congested mess of fast food and chain stores. Everything has changed.

I can not accept these surroundings as home because I largely reject suburban sensibilities, so I am left to wonder where my home is. Then I consider the settlers who arrived in this area in the nineteenth century. If this place was home, what did home mean to them? What is home when your neighbors have just been scalped by Comanche warriors? What is home when your crops won't grow? What is home when you can never get back to Arkansas or Missouri or Germany or Bohemia? These are the kinds of questions I address in my work, and I like the idea that a central theme has emerged to unify much of my writing for this period of my life.



Here is Texas native Don Williams playing Merle Haggard's "Sing Me Back Back Home," a song where music has become home for a condemned prisoner.