Through this pod, we'll dig into what home really is: a place, a people, a memory, a country, a family, a language, a landscape, or something we keep trying to make.

Home is one of the first ideas we inherit, and one of the hardest to define. It can be where we feel most known, and where we feel most trapped. It can be a refuge, a wound, a a story, or a feeling we spend years trying to recreate.

Some people leave home by choice. Some are forced to leave. Some return and discover that the place has changed, or that they have. Some build home slowly, through love, routine, food, friendship, work, children, memory, or care. Some never stop longing for a home that no longer exists.

This Pod explore the deep pull of home: where we come from, what we carry, what we lose, and how we create home at different stages of life. 

Preparation between sessions is designed to take under two hours. 

For this Pod, we will draw our conversation catalysts from the range of sources below, including poems, essays, short stories, memoir excerpts, visual art, and film or television. The final selections may shift slightly in response to the interests, questions, and energy of the group. 

The first session readings will be shared three weeks before the start of the Pod. 

Sources we'll draw from: 

• Joan Didion, “On Going Home” (essay) 

• Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things” (poem) 

• Pico Iyer, “Where Is Home?” (talk) 

• Aeon, “Why There’s No Place Like Home, for Anyone, Anymore” (essay) 

• Lee Isaac Chung

• Minari (film) 

• Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile” (essay) 

• Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent” (short story) 

• Homer, selected passage from The Odyssey (epic poem) 

• Zadie Smith, “Northwest London Blues” (essay) 

• Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina” (poem) 

• Czesław Miłosz, “Mittelbergheim” (poem) 

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Thing Around Your Neck” (short story) 

• Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands” (essay) 

• Scott Russell Sanders, “Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World” (essay) 

• Wallace Stegner, “The Sense of Place” (essay)

• Gaston Bachelard, excerpt from The Poetics of Space (philosophy / essay) 

• Sigmund Freud, excerpt from “The Uncanny” (essay)

• Jamaica Kincaid, “On Seeing England for the First Time” (essay) 

• Virginia Woolf, excerpt from A Room of One’s Own (essay) 

• Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa” (essay) 

• Franz Kafka, “Home-Coming” (short parable) 

• Anton Chekhov, “Home"(short story) 

• Marilynne Robinson, excerpt from The Givenness of Things: Essays (essay) 

• Warsan Shire, “Home” (poem) 

• Carson McCullers, “The House” (short prose) 

• Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (philosophy / essay)