If you were to exit Interstate 85 in Spartanburg, South Carolina on your way to or from some point of greater interest, it’s not likely that much would capture your attention and draw you in. Big box stores and cookie-cutter franchise restaurants line the city’s main street running from east to west, flashing the same endless string of familiar names—Wal-Mart, Applebees, Home Depot—and offering up the same products available in any other town, off any other highway, in any other state.

But just a few miles from Main Street, there are plenty of places and people worthy of a visit. And that’s what writer John Lane is interested in and what he writes about in his newest book, Circling Home. Lane, who spent most of his adult life traveling away from his hometown, finds himself setting some deep roots in that very place in the second half of his life. He married another Spartanburg native and together they have built the county’s first LEED certified home, which is located alongside a creek bed. The premise of Lane’s book is simple: he put a saucer over the place where his home appeared on a topographical map, drew a circle around it, and committed himself to learning as much as possible about life within that circle—the history of the place, the people who have inhabited it, and how the relationships between people and place are forged. What resulted was far more profound than the exercise itself. A meditation about his hometown, Circling Home is also a book about the very idea of place and our relationship with it.

In addition to his writing, Lane is actively involved in a number of community building projects, including Hub-Bub, an artist’s residency community; the Hub City Writer’s Project, a press that is focused on publishing works about place; and, most recently, the conversion of an old textile mill to an environmental studies center for the college where Lane teaches.

In this interview with writer, professor, community builder, kayaker, and self-professed “post-hippie Deep South anarchist,” John Lane shows Matador writer Julie Schwietert around the textile mill being converted into an environmental studies center, and talks about the relationships between people and place, between traveling and settling, and how to form community. Click on the audio links to hear clips from their walk along Lawson’s Fork Creek, and read on for a conversation about Lane’s book and writing about place.  Read More...