I live in the same county in Tennessee where I grew up. If you had told this to the teenage version of myself, he would have had a panic attack. In the nineties, living in Winchester, Tennessee, the county seat of Franklin County, I felt so isolated; everything that interested me (music, film, books, food, museums) always seemed out of reach. I imagined that if I cared about something, I’d have to search it out, and leave. So I did, and I stayed away for nearly ten years. But the longer I stayed away, the more I felt the pull of returning, as if each new experience were preparing me to go home. In 2005, two jobs opened up at the University of the South in Sewanee, back home in Franklin County, on the Cumberland Plateau. My wife, Leigh Anne, had gone to school at Sewanee. I’d grown up in the nearby valley. What in the world would it be like to return to the place
