Mississippi Expat: Beth Kander
"Somehow even after leaving Mississippi, I keep developing new connections there. I’m no longer a resident, but I’m still part of the Mississippi community."
What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Author and playwright Beth Kander spent eleven formative years in Jackson, Mississippi, before moving to Chicago. “Mississippi doesn’t just fit into my definition of home—my time there truly helped me come up with my definition of home,” she writes. Though chances are slim of Beth moving back to Mississippi, she still continues to develop and nourish new connections here. Beth’s forthcoming novel, I Made It Out of Clay, will be published in December, and she’ll be back in the South soon for book events! Today Beth shares how living in Mississippi shaped the person she is now.
Where are you originally from? When did you move to Mississippi?
The “where are you originally from” question is a tricky one for me. I was born in Chicago, but my family moved to rural Michigan before my first birthday. So while I was technically born in Chicago—and now, I’m raising my kids here!—I didn’t grow up here. I lived in four different small midwestern towns by the time I was eight, and I was homeschooled. So even when folks prod: “Well, where did you go to high school?”…there’s still no actual answer.
You know what? I’m just going to start saying my origins are mysterious. People love mysterious origins, right?
In the wake of my enigmatic youth (mysterious origins!), I left for college in Boston at seventeen. When I graduated, at barely twenty-one, I moved to Jackson. I never could have imagined transplanting into the warm southern soil as well as I ultimately did. Though the opportunity that initially brought me to Jackson was a two-year fellowship, I wound up staying in the area for over a decade. To this day, I have more ties to Mississippi than probably anywhere else.
It’s too easy to say “the people,” but you know what? It’s the people. There’s an interconnectedness in Mississippi that I’ve never found anywhere else.
When did you move to Chicago and why did you move there?
The short answer is that we moved to Chicago in 2014 because my husband, Danny, had a job offer. The longer answer is that we’d been eying Chicago for quite some time. My brother lives here, which was a huge selling point. Danny and I are also both Theatre People, and Chicago has a great theatre scene, and several of our Mississippi theatre friends had already made the move up I-55 to Chicago… but leaving Jackson was still a complicated and emotional decision (also, I had not missed northern winters). Still, when opportunity knocked, we decided to mix metaphors and take the leap! We got married in March at the Ohr O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi; by early April, we were settling into an apartment in Lincoln Square; not long thereafter, parenthood shook things up even more.
What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?
Much like the trickiness of the “where are you from” question, for a long time, I struggled to define “home.” Having moved around so much (and layering that in with immigrant grandparents and a whole mess of other complex family lore; mysterious origins!), I felt I could neither claim nor be claimed by any particular place. So instead, I sought out the people that always felt like family to me: theatre people, book people, the volunteers at animal shelters and afterschool programs and marches. And then, you know. I made them dinner, showed up for their events, volunteered and auditioned and cheered for them. I offered people what I was longing for, and in so doing, found what I needed.
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