This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home

(Paperback)

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Description

THIS IS THE PLACE is a collection of essays exploring home, from a diverse collection of writers. Home is a loaded word, and a complex idea for most of us: it's a place that can be safe, sentimental, difficult, nourishing, war-torn, or long-lost. It's a place to escape and a place to create. I believe that The essays cover topics like the bonds we form with our stuff, the smells and sounds we crave, the people and plants we cultivate, the qualities that develop because we hail from one place or another.

Home and family topics that are toothsome, they are hot and present in our rapidly shifting world of self-definition; Wherever I'm With You touches on the many ways that home impacts the rest of our lives, with so many angles for reader interest and media coverage.

Reviews

If only creating a home were as simple as creating a homepage! This Is the Place beautifully and poignantly explores the many complicated feelings that the concept of home evokes in all of us. A must read for any modern woman, wife, daughter, or mother.-Randi Zuckerberg, best-selling author of Dot Complicated

An exquisite collection. Whether it be a moving target or a constant, a place of fondness or melancholy, these women look at what we call home, and the roles we have played within it, from every perspective imaginable. This book will inspire you to ponder what your home has been and is-a provocative and worthy pursuit. -Shawn Colvin, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter

A marvelous collection of original essays that testify to the centrality of home as a place where fantasy and reality collide. Reading the book was like witnessing a series of wrestling matches-the author versus chaos, versus anxiety, versus expectations and finally versus reality. A multi-layered and satisfying anthology of original work.-Thomas Beller, New Yorker contributor and author of J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist

Rich, thoughtful--Toronto Star
The authors of the pieces in this rich collection reveal fresh approaches to making sense of our culture...Their voices help make sense of where we are going, and also where we stay.--Santa Fe New Mexican
The concept of home has certainly evolved beyond a mother haloed in cake flour making home pleasant, as evidenced by the 30 essays in This Is the Place, edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters. This collection, encompassing a spectrum of races, ethnicities, religions, sexualities, political beliefs and classes, could not be timelier. ...open this book, hear its chorus of voices and remember that we are a nation of individuals, bound to each other by our humanity.--The New York Times Book Review
The essays show an honest portrait of the U.S., pieced together like an imperfect American quilt. In reading these stories, and finding the common ground that is shared in our concepts of home, it's easier to see beyond the differences - and to see the bigger picture. We need more books like this.--BUST.com
This Is the Place allows some of America's brightest female writers to explore the often complex and contradictory emotions they have about perhaps the single most emotionally charged word in the English language: home.--New York Journal of Books

Author Bio

Margot Kahn is a writer-in-residence with Seattle Arts & Lectures and the author of the biography Horses That Buck: The Story of Champion Bronc Rider Bill Smith.

Kelly McMasters is the author of WELCOME TO SHIRLEY, one of Oprah's top 5 summer memoirs in 2012; her work has appeared in the NYTimes, Paris Review, Tin House, and many others.

Both editors hold MFAs from Columbia University.