Homeland

Abstract

A geographical essay, styled as creative non-fiction, in which I present a suite of stories about one family’s history and scientific endeavours, organised according to the geographies of a preserved childhood home and its remembered hinterland. By entwining the lifelines of family members, the essay is intended to illustrate the potentials – and ultimately the perils – of journeying a landscape so intimately, according to memory and emotion, attachment and estrangement. As I discover, the need to settle personal history sits in complex relation with efforts aimed at recovering local memory.