Proximity Matters

Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence—a collection of over eighty poems, nonfiction essays, short stories and even illustrated pieces picked by editor Sarah Green, PHD ’15—shows different ways we interact with, or reflect upon, our neighbors, these “other” people who make up our various communities.

In her preface, Green writes that the idea for the anthology began with a reaction, a sense that the American concept of neighborliness had taken a hit during a period when Black Lives Matter, white supremacy rallies, Muslim bans, border walls and the separation of immigrant families were making headlines. Around the same time, Americans were also embracing social media, online gaming and binge-watching—pursuits that in many respects separate us from our physical communities, from the geographic neighborhoods in which we live.

“It seemed to me that the gesture of being not just a neighbor but neighborly … was the gesture we were missing,” Green says.

Admittedly, Green confesses, “my vague nostalgia for a golden age of the more harmonious American neighborhood was likely based in cultural myth.” Hadn’t there always been noisy neighbors? Neighbors whose homes our parents said not to visit? And neighbors we don’t know at all? Rather than selecting writings that highlighted only the good aspects of neighborliness, Green sought a multidimensional portrait, the “warts and all” witnessing of what neighborhoods and communities are like.

Welcome to the Neighborhood was published by Ohio University Press in December 2019. Within a few short months, the pandemic we now know as COVID-19 forced people to isolate themselves from not just their neighbors and co-workers, but also from their extended families, too. Pretty quickly, we realized how challenging it was to be cooped up by ourselves, even if we’d found novel ways to interact virtually. Proximity matters.

In lieu of a traditional book launch party, the Ohio University Alumni Association hosted a virtual reading on Facebook in mid-May, featuring the anthology’s many Bobcat contributors and giving the entire OHIO community an opportunity to explore these questions and ideas, together.

Enjoy the recorded event here, and find discounted copies of Welcome to the Neighborhood still available from the Bobcat Store.

We hope that this is a book and a topic that will generate discussion—a chat, among neighbors. To that end, we’ve included a “Neighborhood Talks” section to the book with discussion questions and writing prompts which will be helpful to spark further thinking and conversation for those using it in classrooms and in book clubs.