I first came across Chris Offutt’s work when I was deciding whether to follow my lover Melissa to Lexington, Kentucky in the summer of 2001 (I moved there the following summer). As a Californian unfamiliar with the area, I wanted to read a Kentucky author. Browsing through Joseph Beth’s bookstore, I came across The Good Brother. The book caught my attention because I was planning a course on “gender and terror” at Illinois State University.  

I later included the novel in my course for the spring of 2002. The class, Interdisciplinary 128: Gender and Terror in Contemporary American Culture, had taken on an increased relevance because of the 9/11 attacks. My classroom was full and the students were eager to learn about terror. Offutt’s novel became the centerpiece of a unit (including Joseph Rodriguez’s photo-documentary East Side Stories, the film American History X, the Media Education Foundation’s documentary film Tough Guise, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and the contradictory narratives of the fictional Boys Don’t Cry and the documentary The Brandon Teena Story) that explored the terror resulting from the construction of a masculinity centered around violence as a solution to problems.

“The Good Brother” brought into play so many different contexts for understanding this problem. Through discussions of the novel, we brought up issues of gender, class, regional identity, militia politics, and societal pressures. What kept my Illinois students fascinated the most though was Virgil Caudill’s love of his Kentucky environment and his magical descriptions of his homeplace. The students developed a keen awareness of how fitting into a place and feeling comfortable in an environment (at many levels) was a key to human satisfaction.  

This insight also helped us to understand the later texts in this section: to confront the violence of gang members in “East Side Stories” and “American History X” without dismissing the experiences that led to their actions, to explore the alienation of Jack Gladney from his environment in “White Noise,” and to attempt to address the narrative differences of the two film versions of Brandon Teena’s murder. The issues of place, the problems of community, and the human desire to belong, once raised by Offutt, took on an extreme importance in the course and would not be denied. It still affects me in my teaching and research.

Now I’m at the University of Kentucky, where I’m teaching writing-courses centered around the concepts of Place, Identity, and Community. We have developed this new program as an attempt to bridge students’ everyday experiences and academic knowledge. We hope that through discussion and writing about our sense of self, place, and community, we can develop a new awareness of the possibilities of writing/thinking as a form of civic engagement and hopefully, in the process, provide a helping hand to at-risk students. Naive, perhaps, idealistic, definitely — but what else can I do — this is what matters to me!  

Offutt’s writing powerfully speaks to the experience of inhabiting a place, but even more importantly, what it means to lose or leave a beloved place. As a nomadic academic, I ache for the home I left and, perhaps, am fearful of possibly losing the connections to that community. At the same time, there is a feeling of guilt for leaving and a sense of loss for the place that I can never again experience (even when I return, because it is a fantasy of a nostalgic memory). Offutt’s experiences and writings speak to this reality, his words resonate with a more personal terror, the loss of “place.”

thivai