“If convention has it right, these are writers who bear something close to a genetic predisposition to produce a literature suffused with place.”

For the past twenty years, I have made a career as a teacher of American literature. For the last twelve, I have worked also, with equal seriousness and passion, as a photographer. My new series, Native Ground, unites these pursuits in an exploration of the role place plays in shaping the literary imagination: the notion that writers compose out of a peculiar understanding and depth of connection to physical space, remembered or immediate.