We finished watching the first season of Gentified on Netflix last night, which I really enjoyed, but it got me bothered again with why we continue to only talk about gentrification as an urban issue.

Ultimately rural gentrification has been in the background of every novel I’ve written, but most noticeably this one. https://bookshop.org/a/185/9780525536888

I think I’m probably more sensitive than most to it in that my childhood was quite literally a matter of watching the place my family was tied to, the place where our story was rooted, disappear around us. It’s gone now. It’s been gone. Erased. Extinction.

As Gertrude Stein put it, “There is no there there.”

That’s likely why it’s become so central to my work. Everything I think about place and people is filtered through that lens of what’s there, what was, and what’s disappearing. As Maurice Manning put it, “the gone and the going away.”

A few summers ago I was asked by a PBS documentarian to show him the place where I live, to tell its story. Inevitably I told him little but instead introduced him to the voices I thought he needed to hear.

What wound up happening was that I gathered very different perspectives who all echoed a singular thing and I was left with one thought: the history of all places is a story of displacement.

I started to wonder whether the reason I cared so much was selfish, whether my anger and fixation boiled down to the fact that I was witnessing it happen to 𝘮𝘺 people.

But in the end I realized that wasn’t it at all, that I’m equally bothered watching it happen to historically Black neighborhoods in Asheville or in Latin communities in LA where Gentified is set.

The only reason I can come up with is that attachment to place strikes me as the most quintessential relationship I recognize. That singular thing is what governs damn near every aspect of my life. As Ron Rash put it, “Landscape is destiny.”

For the good, for the bad, I just can’t see it any other way.