Elizabeth Rush

With a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, I will develop a work of autofiction tentatively titled These Andes about bicultural family-making in an environmentally damaged world.

Often writing about the environment demands deep engagement in a single place over a long period of time. While my father’s father managed a soda pop bottling plant in Northeast Ohio and his father maintained a gentleman’s farm ten miles north of there, that kind of rootedness is nothing I have experienced in my life. I have lived in five countries, on both coasts of the United States, in New York City and a small postindustrial mill town in Maine. I am married to a man who immigrated to the United States from Colombia when he was 26. His grandfather was the mayor of Cartagena and much of his extended family remains on the Caribbean coast. Together, my husband and I have become profoundly dislocated from the places that reared us. These days we spend almost as much time in Bogotá as we do in Providence, but it never feels like enough in either space for roots to really grow.

Just over three years ago, I gave birth to a boy whose home is here and there; who has inherited two places, both of them unstable (economically, financially, environmentally) in their own ways. His birth has made me wonder whether our definition of home is changing, shifting away from a place that offers deep familiarity and the potential for physical refuge to something else? It is my hope that These Andes will explore this question. What’s more: I am excited by the possibility of discovering a new kind of form, one that blends the documentary practice that has been so central to my writing thus far with something unfamiliar, something just over the horizon.