Geography is very important to me. When I first am getting to meet someone, I always ask “Where have you lived?” I don’t believe it’s significantly different from asking someone who they are.

My grandparents’ parents were Ashkenazi Jews who spoke Yiddish. Roughly half were from the Russian Pale of Settlement, from the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. Roughly half were from various places in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, mainly Lviv, which is also currently part of Ukraine.

One great-grandparent, whom I’m named after, was born in British-occupied Egypt and grew up in Palestine, before roving to Europe and eloping from Lviv with my great-grandmother to Galveston, Texas, where I’m told they opened a movie theater.

My father’s family settled and flourished in New York City. After various peregrinations, the ones who would eventually be my mother’s family settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where my father moved for work and, eventually, where I was born.

The peregrinations never stopped, as my family moved from Milwaukee to St. Louis, on to Denver, then mostly settling in Indianapolis. Family members are scattered in all these directions and in new ones.

I myself have continued moving, going to college in New Mexico and Maryland, spending a year teaching English in Guǎngzhōu, China, and living and working back in New Mexico, Colorado, and North Carolina.

I currently live in the Pacific Northwest, in Portland, Oregon. I reject the notion that people and things are isolated from the environments they inhabit. Landscapes, human or inhuman, are always talking to us, telling us who we are. We are vulnerable to our environment, the way that babies are vulnerable to being shaped by their parents, so I find it important to pick a location that imagines me in a kind way. So far, I’m enjoying who I am in Portland, and I’m looking forward to growing into this place.