Sunday, November 26, 2006
ATHENS --Writer and editor Lisa Watts also explores how home shapes a person's life and accomplishments in her upcoming book, "Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio," due out in January from Ohio University Press.
The anthology features 16 essays and nine poems, some previously published and others original to the book, by 19 of the nation's best contemporary writers, all of whom are native Ohioans including: P.J. O'Rourke, Elizabeth Dodd, Susan Orlean, Kathleen Dean Moore, Jeffrey Smith and Alix Kates Shulman. The authors' childhoods are as varied as their writings, with some reared in urban Cleveland, Akron and Cincinnati and others from small towns or rural Ohio. Some pieces are humorous and others not so much so, but each piece in "Roots" is nostalgic, sincere and resonates with the importance of place and community -- of having a sense of roots.
This kind of childhood is something that Watts says in her introduction that she envies because, unlike her older sisters who recall much of the family's time in Cleveland Heights, what Watts knows of childhood roots is transience. The family moved when she was 3 and she lived most of her life on East Coast. A sense of roots is something that she wanted that she hoped to give her own children when she moved back to the small town in Wooster, but the family was uprooted 10 years later by her husband's job transfer to North Carolina.
"Good Roots" is a tribute to Ohio, its people and the place, which as Watts says, many cherish even if they no longer call it home.