“I like exploring the city, any city, whether it’s the one I live in or the one I’m going to. Part of it is just being in natural spaces. We’re constantly moving through the places we live without really seeing them, being in them, and feeling them. I try to take the time to remind myself to just stop and look around and see what’s there. And what’s not there too. The places we live are constantly transforming and you can’t always see the histories that came before. While I’m walking I contemplate ‘what am I seeing, what am I not seeing, and how does that affect my experience?’ I do a lot of looking..and intentionally bumping into people because we constantly pass people, but we never really meet them. I think that’s the sad thing about our modern experience. We’re always sharing space but never really being in space together.”

“Very cool. So you do a lot of walking and exploring, what do you do for work?”
“I’m an English professor.”
“That makes sense, you’re incredibly articulate and well spoken.”
“Thank you. I study literature and I study geography so that’s why how people are placed and how people remember and experience places is so important to me.”
“Where do you teach?”
“USC. I’m down here writing and researching.”
“What are you writing?”
It’s an academic book, mostly novelist, filmmakers, dramatists and poets. I look at how they read southern space as nuance and texture, particularly in terms of the history of marginalized voices. Various ethnic and female voices are often absent in larger conversations. How do we create a conversation that shaped by multiple groups of people and not just one?“