{"id":1573,"date":"2016-08-08T15:27:41","date_gmt":"2016-08-08T15:27:41","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2021-08-03T16:41:10","modified_gmt":"2021-08-03T16:41:10","slug":"guest-post-newest-write-house-winner-anne-elizabeth-moore-detroit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ourstories.shinola.com\/our-stories\/guest-post-newest-write-house-winner-anne-elizabeth-moore-detroit\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post: Newest Write A House Winner Anne Elizabeth Moore on Detroit"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve been introducing you to writers<\/a> all year long with Detroit’s Write A House<\/a> residency program \u2014 where authors, poets, journalists, and writers from all walks of life are rewarded with a Detroit home to keep forever. We asked the newest resident, Anne Elizabeth Moore<\/a>, to tell us her first impressions of the city she now calls home.<\/span><\/p>\n

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My name is Anne Elizabeth Moore. For 23 years I based my writing and reporting practice in Chicago \u2014 with extended stays in Seattle, Phnom Penh, Berlin, and Vienna, and shorter stays in Tbilisi, Leipzig, Catskill NY, and DC mixed in. (Some of my last seven years of research from these locales can be seen in my latest book Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking<\/a>, a comics journalism report on connections between the global sex and garment trades and the anti-trafficking movement.) Now I write from Banglatown, a Detroit neighborhood with a healthy Bengali immigrant population, where I won a house in May. There\u2014in between gardening sessions\u2014I\u2019m finishing an essay collection on misogyny, capitalism, and jokes called Body Horror<\/a>. It will be out in March.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n

Someone (OK, it was me) has fed my cat Bengali food and now, when he smells it cooking, he meows out the window toward the neighbor\u2019s house, running to me if I move or change positions or even glance up from my desk.<\/p>\n

His name is Thurber, although the neighbors call him Turber. Some of them call him Herbert. He doesn\u2019t care as long as he gets hand fed small bits of spicy chicken, little bits of curried chickpeas, a fried vegetable dumpling. <\/p>\n

My other cat, All Girl Metal Band, does not care for Bengali cuisine. The neighbors call her Metal Van. Why not? To ten-year-olds, a van made of metal makes a lot more sense than a joke about a historically masculine western musical genre.<\/p>\n

She didn’t like most people until we moved here. Now she likes everyone.<\/p>\n

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Anne planted sunflower seeds in the backyard of her new home when she first moved in \u2014 now they are over 6 feet tall.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n

“You’re so Detroit now,” my friend George says to me at the Toronto Art Book Fair, where I am giving a brief talk on my latest book. “Can you ever imagine life without it?”<\/p>\n

He\u2019s teasing, mostly, since I have seen him twice in the six weeks since I moved to Detroit and neither time in Detroit. Still, I test it on the return trip.  Do I feel like I am returning home when I board my flight? How about as I land? Am<\/em> I Detroit? What is it, to be<\/em> Detroit?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if I can answer those questions yet. But more importantly, no: I can not imagine life without it.<\/p>\n

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Anne shows us the pumpkin plants in her backyard.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you even like it here?\u201d My bank teller asks me, examining my Illinois driver\u2019s license. \u201cAfter Chicago, isn\u2019t it sort of like living on the farm?\u201d<\/p>\n

She means this as a metaphor, as if I have moved from the big city out to some quiet rural habitat with only a cow for a friend. She doesn\u2019t know I had just been to the garden center, where I re-upped my strawberry starters, picked up some manure, and grabbed a new packet of spinach seeds. She doesn\u2019t know that the night before I\u2019d eaten my first meal comprised mostly of greens I had grown myself, topped with a salad dressing I\u2019d concocted from homemade vinegar. She doesn\u2019t know that before I unpacked a single box inside this house, I dropped several beans in the ground in my front yard, hoping an elaborate growth of vegetable-giving vines would curl up my porch, or that my neighbor side-eyed me then, and asked why I didn\u2019t want pretty flowers in front of my new, pretty house. Later, this same neighbor found some beans from her country abandoned in my backyard, and shelled them into my hand, mostly conveying through gesture what I was to do with them. I planted some in my front yard, too, and now that the Bengali beans are coming in alongside the Kentucky ones, she couldn\u2019t be more excited. \u201cIf your beans come in first, I will borrow them,\u201d she says. Even the across-the-street neighbor, a man of some stature, has come by to express his enthusiasm for the front-yard bean-growing project.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a little bit like that,\u201d I tell the bank teller. \u201cAnd that\u2019s exactly what I like about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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We’ve been introducing you to writers all year long with Detroit’s Write A House residency program \u2014 where authors, poets, journalists, and writers from all walks of life are rewarded with a Detroit home to keep forever. We asked the newest resident, Anne Elizabeth Moore, to tell us her first impressions of the city she now calls home. [[{“type”:”media”,”view_mode”:”media_original”,”fid”:”2368″,”attributes”:{“alt”:””,”class”:”media-image”,”height”:”540″,”typeof”:”foaf:Image”,”width”:”960″}}]] […]<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[24,9],"yoast_head":"\nGuest Post: Newest Write A House Winner Anne Elizabeth Moore on Detroit - Our Stories<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ourstories.shinola.com\/our-stories\/guest-post-newest-write-house-winner-anne-elizabeth-moore-detroit\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Guest Post: Newest Write A House Winner Anne Elizabeth Moore on Detroit - Our Stories\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"We’ve been introducing you to writers all year long with Detroit’s Write A House residency program \u2014 where authors, poets, journalists, and writers from all walks of life are rewarded with a Detroit home to keep forever. 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