Matt Miller’s essay, “Writing Exile and Reading Homeward” (Front Porch Republic, February 14, 2025), has stirred up my thoughts about the writing Susie and I do in a very positive way.
Miller, a native Nebraskan, appreciates regional writers like Willa Cather and Wendell Berry for their ability to draw out the beauty of local people and culture. He would like to have been a regional writer of his native Nebraska, but events have landed him in the Missouri Ozarks for the past 15 years. Nevertheless, he says, “Years living away didn’t blunt my homesickness; if anything, my life in exile made my identity as a Nebraskan ever more central to the story I told about myself.”
His essay reviews Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Wendell Berry’s Jaber Crow as examples of the kind of work he himself would like to do. Miller has long “felt a calling to love and care for my overlooked home state.” But he no longer knows the area like he used to, and he has not taken the time to learn the area where he and his family live.
Miller concludes, “Here, then, is my homecoming of the imagination: to hold the past bright in memory, and to love also the saplings and the weeds of my exile. I live in hope that such a homecoming can make me a writer whose work springs not just out of the wound of exile, but from the precious memory and the living reality of home.”
Miller’s fine essay got me thinking. I have never had a desire to return to my childhood town, and nowhere we’ve lived has ever really felt like home to me. I would find it very satisfying to be a local or regional writer, but I don’t see that happening.Then it occurred to me that I already am a regional writer, and so is Susie. Our neighborhood and locale are the Scriptures. Its characters are our neighbors, its history our history, and its continuous blossoming of new and transformative insights are the spiritual flora and fauna of our lives. My writing is almost exclusively Biblical writing, addressing one of two questions: “What does the Bible say?” and “What does the Bible say about…?”
We are finding our region to be a rich resource for personal growth and ministry. I want to see the Bible as my home and region, and to appreciate more and more of the infinite ways the beauty of Jesus shines through its every page and line.
