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My wife's family lives up in South Carolina, so we go back and forth quite a bit up there.

I grew up in a small farming town called Concord, outside Charlotte in North Carolina.

People don't come to Asheville very often, and they don't know I'm there. I enjoy it. I like it.

I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That's where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape.

I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town.

I was born technically in D.C., and then my family moved to the Columbia area when I was in elementary school. It was right on the line between Clarksville and Columbia in Howard County. I remember it being just like a peaceful, safe atmosphere. I always felt connected to the woods and that whole suburban feel.

I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina - what's called Tobacco Road. It was very rural.

Where I grew up in the North-east, the community there, and the way people relate to one another, goes very deep. But I don't define myself as a Northerner in that I don't live in the North.

We moved around a bit when I was younger, but I grew up primarily in Rhode Island, in a beautiful seaside community called East Greenwich. It was a small town, and so safe that we rarely locked our doors at night.