Sanctuaries navigates the environment of home via interrelated essays and vignettes personal to my upbringing in rural Southwest Indiana. By exploring my own childhood, youth, and family traumas and successes, I have crafted a collection that speaks volumes about seeing the world from a perspective both privileged and underprivileged simultaneously. I uncover my lineage\u27s numerous bouts with physical and mental illness and unrealized dreams, but I also bring to light our traditions of spreading kindness, treading lightly in the world, and preparing inordinate amounts of food and festive cheer to balance out times of hardship. Few writers have attempted to paint the Southern-Midwest\u27s landscape and to characterize its people as more than caricatures caught between the factories of the north and the tobacco fields of the south, so I rose to that challenge. What results is an essay collection rife with excess and squalor, abandon and abandonment, humor and deep sorrow, atheism and fervent belief in the supernatural, and snippets of what it really means, by my home region\u27s estimation, to be part of a family
