LISTEN TO EPISODE 115!

Dear Listener,

By the time you hear this episode, my last (for now) with Commonplace, I will have moved and be living in a new town, smaller than New York, in what poet and interdisciplinary artist Moheb Soliman refers to as "flyover country." I’m looking at this move as an adventure into the unknown that is, in some sense, also a return. Though I've never lived in Pennsylvania before, having grown up in Birmingham, I do come from that largely invisible middle of the country.

When I was in Seattle in March for AWP–my first trip to the West Coast–my partner and I hadn’t begun talking about moving. But the conversations I had that week–both recorded and behind the scenes–seemed to circle around questions of locality and belonging. One afternoon, Rachel and I were walking from our Airbnb in Capitol Hill–she to the Conference Center and I to the hotel across the street to speak with Moheb–when she asked if I thought I’d stay in New York long term. I said I didn’t know–but at the time, the conversation was purely theoretical. So when Moheb and I sat down for our conversation, place and belonging were already on my mind.

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest who's presented work at literary, art, and public spaces in the US, Canada, and abroad with support from the Joyce Foundation, Banff Centre, Minnesota State Arts Board, and diverse other institutions. He has degrees from The New School for Social Research and University of Toronto and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he was Program Director for the Arab American lit and film organization Mizna before receiving a multi-year Tulsa Artist Fellowship and this year a Milkweed Editions fellowship. His debut poetry collection HOMES (Coffee House Press, 2021), explores nature, modernity, identity, belonging, and sublimity through the site of the Great Lakes bioregion / borderland. Moheb has been a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards, Heartland Booksellers Award, and others, and was showcased in Ecotone's annual indie press shortlist and the Poets & Writers annual 10 debut poets feature. See more of his work at www.mohebsoliman.info.

I would never have guessed then that when I began editing this episode I would be going through such a significant change in my relationship to place. Listening to this conversation, I’m struck with the clarity with which both of us talk about feelings of belonging and connection to place (even as I was struggling through brutal jetlag!). We discuss how Moheb’s debut collection HOMES became a book, regionalism as a creative and critical practice, the poetics of the watershed, the coasts and the “third coasts” of the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, cultivating a non-extractive relationship to place, immigrant, indigenous, and settler narratives of the Great Lakes, timelessness vs. timeliness, and memory. You can listen to episode 115 right here.

Thank you for listening,

With love,

V