WHERE WE ARE FROM
The answer, when someone asks where you are “from” might be to tell the place where we get your mail these days. That’s the easy answer. But where are your roots? Again, the answer is more than a location. You are from and have been made fully YOU by family and community, tradition and custom, the music and culture of your childhood and youth, and so much more.
As I offered here a few weeks back, the template-guide adapted from the Where I’m From poem by Kentucky poet George Ella Lyon has given countless ordinary folks who are mostly not poets a framework to explore more deeply their roots that guided their growth from their past into their present.
Alyson Shelton has had conversations with almost 200 people on the single topic of their response to the prompts in the poem-template for Where I’m From. Recently, she reached out and found me. I was an early source for the template to blog readers in 2003. Here is the taped part of a longer conversation with Alyson that was a high point on my calendar and quite a pleasure. Seeing my old self on camera, not so much…