Back issues are available for $5 per copy. 

   
Editor’s Note from Summer 2002 issue:

We are pleased to present you with this fifth issue of you are here.  Last fall, we asked for submissions responding to questions such as, how does where we are affect who we are? What does it mean to be displaced? Disoriented? Reoriented? What happens when we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory--be it another country, or a stranger’s house?  What impressions do we leave on our new surroundings? 

In keeping with previous themes we have suggested, we received a wide variety of responses,  not all of which relate directly to the questions we posed. However, our policy is to not limit ourselves to a strict thematic recipe, and in fact, half the fun of publishing this journal is the last-minute realization that somehow all the ingredients go perfectly together, just as whoever created the first tuna casserole must have felt. 

In Ordinary Man in Pinstripes, we meet the clearly disoriented and confused character of Kessel, who has chosen Tampa as the stadium for his place-based mid-life crisis. As he attempts to rediscover his freedom in an anonymous landscape of material pleasures, he realizes he has merely incarcerated himself in a new kind of prison.  But native Floridian Gregory Byrd sees what Kessel and his ilk do not, and his poem “Monk Parrots” evokes what every local in a tourist destination must sometimes feel. 

Jennifer Spiegel shows us snapshots from her collegiate European travels, and somewhat wistfully reflects on how her life has evolved since those captured moments of endless possibility, romance, and exploration. In the autobiographical fiction In a Drowning Flash, Derek White explores what it would be like to experience life from a different vantage point, and writes about one childhood moment in which this altered state was achieved. On the flip side, James Barilla takes at look at a single place, Davis, California, through the eyes of three different characters, each of whom tells the story of how they came there to make a new home. 

Photographs by Miguel Villarreal also view similar landscapes from different perspectives, sometimes leading us to question just exactly where we are as we look on.  Laressa Manning’s monoprints give us a bird’s eye view of the southwestern urban landscape, revealing a stark contrast between the clearly drawn lines of human development, and the blurry topography of the desert. 

And finally, Henk van Houtum and Anke Struver question traditional notions of borders, asking us to blur the lines in our imagination.  Dominic Corva answers this call in his poem, which explores the borders and states within our own consciousness.

And there you have it – volume 4, numero uno.

While it is sometimes a challenge to keep this journal alive, with its shoestring budget and volunteer staff, I believe it perseveres due to its merit as a publication and the unquenchable demand for a forum of its kind (add to that a cupful of passion, a dash of guilt).  Because while we may not all consider ourselves geographers (after all, don’t they just make maps?), place does matter—to everyone!  This is all the poor, misunderstood geographer is really trying to illustrate, and the essays, stories, poems and images that found their way to these pages reveal, perhaps more clearly than the latest conference proceedings, just how universal a truth this is. 

In a sense you are here is a becoming a well-established place of its own, where, to borrow the eloquent words of founding editor Kimi Eisele, “words and pictures pull places off the map and re-cast them into full relief. Where representation of space and place get personal, and landscape blurs into memoir.”  We hope you enjoy exploring it.

Jennifer Shepherd

Tucson, AZ

June, 2002, 109° F