ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with a description of author's day-to-day life as a child in the small town of Luray, Virginia. It describes and analyzes speaking with a lisp, which leads to reflections on the category of minor bodily stigmas. The chapter emphasizes the difficulty of communication across the boundaries of the communities of the dying and the living. It contains vignettes written at and about our second home, a small, rural, mountain community in the southeastern United States. The chapter attempts to integrate the complex, sometimes contradictory, components of author's life and scholarship—personal with the professional; family with academia; work with play; heart with head and homogeneous small town with cosmopolitan urban life.
