Hello from my new home in Mississippi, where I’ve joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi and moved everything into this 100 year old shotgun house (well, mostly everything). The house originally came from a town called Alligator over in the Delta and was plunked down here a few decades ago, just a few miles south of Oxford and off the old road where Faulkner would run his horses and Bill Eggleston once drove his car into a ditch. Over yonder is a good swimming hole and out back is a fallow cotton field. Some nights the septuagenarian who lives in the farmhouse across the field will come by for a drink. She is a real spitfire and can put down more Bud heavies than an Sig Nu on Saturday night. We plan to walk to town for a piece of catfish soon. Meanwhile I just got off the wait list at the post office for a PO Box; no one here in this town of 300 keeps a regular mailbox. I got number 12 because one of the old timers died, I reckon.
Anyway, I couldn’t be more excited to join such a storied institution in such a storied place, with the charge of shepherding the transition of the photo program into a new era. But I’m also here simply because I want to be. “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home,” Faulkner once wrote. After several years in the desert (literally and figuratively), this is the place where I'll make home, tend to an irreparably broken heart, and redouble my photographic work within a rich and familiar geography. At this point in life, fresh starts are few and far between. I’m grateful to have this one and to be home on this little postage stamp of native soil.
Y'all come visit.
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