Staying or going...

3 November 2022: Had a great conversation today with my Gender and Women's Studies students about Junot Diaz's "Drown" and that tension between staying and going (or feeling stuck versus escaping) that so many of them are so familiar with as West Virginians. "That's the gift of literature," I said, "that people from rural West Virginia can relate to a Dominican-American kid in urban New Jersey." (I've blogged about this before. It comes up often in literature classes, in fact.)

I mentioned that Emma Copley Eisenberg, the author of this year's Common Reading, The Third Rainbow Girl, make a similar point about young West Virginians in her book, specifically voiced by a Shepherd alum (a transgender man towards whom the place can seem so hostile). Tonight, during the Q&A after her lecture, Eisenberg mentioned that she think cities and rural areas are actually alike in that you often put up with a lot of misery to stay in this place you love. That point seems spot-on to me.