“When I taught English classes at a university in the Midwest,” Sarah Domet writes, “I often turned to William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! as a representative sample of a ‘Southern’ book. . . . At the heart of the novel stands a character who both transcends and is forever bound by his roots.”

Interestingly, I have never taught Absalom! Absalom! in any Southern classroom. Perhaps this is due to my fear of being outed as an outsider myself, my fear of being seen as the dreaded Yankee stereotype who instructs Southerners on the ways of the world. Yet, as I was recently re-reading this great Southern novel, something struck me: My desires to belong to a new region—my anxieties of place, too—are all very Southern, at least in a literary sense. In my fear of not being Southern enough I was playing out the very themes of Southern fiction. Time and time again Southern writers confront the conflicting notions of what it means to live in the South, be of the South, find a home in a place with a complicated history. Time and time again Southern writers have reminded me that misfits and outsiders alike all have a shot at redemption. It is Flannery O’Connor herself who famously notes, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”