Half of What I Say Is Meaningless

Bathanti's sensitive, funny, and insightful series of memoirs won the 2012 Will D. Campbell Award for Creative Nonfiction for "the best manuscript that speaks to the human condition in a Southern context." While his hometown is Pittsburgh, much of his charm is sharing the thoughts of an outsider who finds that on "the other side of the Fort Pitt Tunnels lay my destiny, another imaginary plain: the American South." His first and longest essay describes how he left home at age 23 for a job as a VISTA volunteer in North Carolina, during which time he meets a Southern woman who will become his wife. He discovers that his "eye and ear were already being changed by the somewhere-else Southern scapes and inflections, by the weather of a context the writer calls place, and everybody else calls home." Although the essays are not in chronological order%E2%80%94his last essay is a moving account of how he faced the possibility of being drafted to serve in the Vietnam war%E2%80%94taken together, his various adventures in the South, such as visiting Thomas Wolfe's boyhood home, add up to a meaningful look at the roots of Bathanti's life and writing: "Traipsing out of one world, through a secret portal, and lurching into another." (June)