Thanks to Lad Tobin, my committee chair, who played a pivotal role in helping me find the field of composition and rhetoric and who has been a steady supporter of my work from the very beginning. You modeled ways of connecting the personal and academic, and you enlarged my perspective on writing so that I could take student writing seriously and feel comfortable researching a new form like blogging.

Thanks to Paula Mathieu, who has help me see the connections between the political and the academic. You have modeled how academic work can be informed and enlivened by activism, and your commitment to community issues has give me an example of how to write both about and with places.

Thanks to Eric Gordon, who helped deepen my understanding of the connection between place and the network through your scholarship on network locality and through our neighborly chats over coffee in Jamaica Plain.

Thanks to my friends and family, who always helped me believe I could finish if I wanted to and also assured me that things would be fine if I didn’t.

Thanks to Cathy O’Keefe for your steady love and support over the long haul. Thanks for the weekend hikes, nights out, and days off together that you sacrificed in order for me to write. Your editing effort rose to heroic heights at the end, and I hate to imagine how it would have gone without your expert eyes.

Thanks to Instructional Design and eTeaching Services at Boston College for always affirming the value of my studies and for allowing me to start at 10:00 every morning for the last few years so I could get my coffee shop time in.

Thanks to the coffee shops that kept me well caffeinated and gave me friendly “third places” in which to write: Cafenation in Brighton Center and Ula Café, Sweet Finnish, and JP Licks in Jamaica Plain.

Thanks to the place bloggers—Fred, Alison, Allan, Beth, Maria, Chris, Lorianne, Simon, Lisa, and everyone else—for your generous and thoughtful approach towards place and towards me, without which this project would never have happened.

Thanks to the places that have shaped me:

To Fargo, just for being home.To my grandparents’ farm, for giving me childhood memories of living close to land.
To Bear Trap Ranch in Colorado, for rooting the mountains deep in my soul.
To Chicago, for being the first city I fell for.
To Jamaica Plain, for being the Boston neighborhood that finally welcomed me home.

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