Our highly anticipated Why This Place?: A Future-Forward Retrospective book is finally complete and available for purchase! In this book, we reflect with our friends on some of the work we’ve done in Green River, what we’ve learned, and why this might matter to people anywhere else. The book began as a conversation between friends on Maria Sykes’s porch on a Friday afternoon in 2020. The early days of the pandemic, though incredibly challenging, gave us the gift of time to reflect, while simultaneously, our collaborators were also given this time to reflect — allowing the conversation to grow larger across Zoom, Google Docs, and phone calls. What resulted was over 200 full-color pages of essays, interviews, illustrations, and poetry.
As we looked back on past ways we had attempted to archive our work, the integral difference this time seemed to be in the “Why This Place?” rather than “This is The Place,” our desire to self-analyze rather than monograph. We knew we wanted to defend rural places, but at the same time, we questioned why we were constantly asked to do so.
Each section of the book presents themes intrinsically intertwined in much of Epicenter’s work as we continue to hold up the mirror to ourselves and ask, “What have we learned?” This book is by no means an exhaustive retrospective, but rather intentional and curated, and a product of the time period in which it was created. In the depths of the pandemic, we reached out to collaborators to reflect on their work or create new work. These are the folks who responded and conversations that ensued.
To purchase your copy today, contribute to our end-of-year Giving Tuesday fundraiser for $75+ to receive a copy of the book, Why This Place postcards, and a poster.
