GFT Publishing - John Willis My Place

The concept of "my place" is challenging for me. Certainly, there are the places that are integral to my overall "sense of place" and its associations with a sense of comfort, identity, and well being. For years, I have lived in Dummerston, a wonderful small home in the Green Mountains of Vermont, with my wife, Pauline. We have a quiet country setting on a hill overlooking the West River, with a vegetable garden and Pauline's flowerbeds. My studio is there in my basement, and I teach at Marlboro College, a small liberal arts college nearby. My son, who is now grown and living on his own, is near enough for us to visit regularly, which is a gift.

In 1992, I co-founded The In-Sight Photography Project, a nonprofit organization that offers photography programming to area youth regardless of their ability to pay, and I have been involved with the program as a volunteer ever since. In that same year, I was introduced to a family on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home of the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe, and I've spent one to three months a year there ever since, staying with people there I relate to as family. I consider the reservation to be another part of my home at this point in my life, especially since Pauline and I met there almost twenty years ago.

Through my work with the college and In-Sight, and being married to an Australian who wants to see the wider world, I've learned to appreciate diversity and culture by traveling a fair bit, often with students. The places we go to and experience with fellow travelers, learning from and collaborating with those we visit in host communities, all feels like a piece of home, welcoming enough to consider them as included in my space. I only hope that, in my treading into these various places from Vermont onward, I can share the welcoming feeling and learning with others so they, too, may gain from the shared experiences.