But so then Sheila, when you were moving to Vermont, was this novel kind of a part of your, like, was this part of what made this move okay in your mind?

Yeah, definitely.

I feel like Vermont was the place I was always intended to live and I didn't figure it out until I got here.

But I grew up on the West Coast and I actually fell in love first with Wallace Stegner when I was living in the Midwest.

So when I was living in North Dakota and teaching at the University of North Dakota, I Right when I moved out there, I read Wolf Willow, his somewhat autobiographical novel about growing up in that part of the country close to the Canadian border during the Depression.

And then after that, I read Big Rock Candy Mountain.

And so I really kind of associated Stegner with that landscape.

And he's kind of, I think he's grappling with that a little bit throughout the book.

How did that play in?

Well, first, I'm a big fan of Han- Anne Helen Peterson, and I saw that same Substack [laughs] and, and read it as well because obviously I was interested in the issue, and I was, um, I was interested in thinking about that as I was writing the book as well, about how we prioritize or arrange our lives in such a way so as to prioritize or deprioritize the kinds of social arrangements that I'm talking about.

And that includes, you know, being able to get together with friends and hang out in, you know, relatively easy and accessible ways.

And I'm an academic, as you mentioned, and in the book, I talk a lot about the experience of being sort of forced to move all around the United States as I was working on, you know, building up towards that occupation and, and towards that job trajectory for myself.

And I, I sort of didn't realize that aspect of the job at the time.

I think I'd still had this, like, kind of idea in my head that I was going to get my PhD, move back to the West Coast, and be located near my family, which did not happen.

I, I now live about twenty-three hundred miles away from my family.

How do you think about the workplace and the good and the bad of that being such a central site of socializing?