Mississippi Native: Emily Liner

"I loved calling DC home during the years I was there, but when the little voice in my head said it was time to go home, there was only one answer to what that meant."

What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Today we hear from former political consultant and current founder and owner of Friendly City Books in Columbus, MS.

Featured contributor Emily Liner. Photo by John Noltner.

Where are you from?

I grew up on the Coast in Bay Saint Louis and now reside in Columbus in Northeast Mississippi.

Why did you leave Mississippi? Where did you go?

I initially left Mississippi after graduating from high school. I was fixated on going to college out of state. Growing up, I always felt like a fish out of water, and I thought a change of scenery would fix everything. Little did I suspect then that I’d eventually return. I lived in Washington, DC, from 2004 to 2020 with a brief stint in Chapel Hill, NC, for grad school.

Why did you return to Mississippi?

The short answer is, I saw a neighborhood in Columbus full of old houses I loved. The long answer is, I was having existential concerns about society writ large. I noticed that the Members of Congress I worked with seemed really pessimistic about the state of the country.

People say Washington is broken all the time. The truth is, Washington is a reflection of the rest of the country. I came to realize that the brokenness is the result of clustering into places where we are surrounded by people who are just like ourselves and away from people we might disagree with, which creates an environment where the most extreme views dominate.

When I got to DC, being from Mississippi was such a unique characteristic that it was almost my entire identity.

Needless to say, I realized I was part of the problem. I left Mississippi because it was easier to get away from the feeling of not fitting in than to fight and try to make it somewhere I would fit in. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there were places and people in Mississippi that created a space for me—I just had to put a little effort into meeting them.

The rubber hit the road for me during the summer of 2019 when I started to think seriously about what it would mean to listen to that little voice in the back of my head and come home. One Sunday afternoon I was driving down Highway 45 to Columbus after visiting my grandma in Olive Branch, and I was listening to a podcast interview with Kiese Laymon, and he said something that stopped me in my tracks: “Mississippi doesn’t need to be a place you perpetually run away from. Sometimes we need to run to Mississippi in order to create dope shit.” That was it.

Emily reads to the Fairview Elementary School field trip group.