The Story Behind Heart Land

"I wrote Heart Land during the past few years because I wanted to remind myself and others of what’s good about being an American. Right or wrong, like most of my countrymen, I felt the United States had taken a bad turn recently in our relationship with the world. The face we were showing wasn’t the face that I loved and honored.

As a young woman, I spent several years traveling and living in Europe and Africa, and I while I loved every place I stayed and cannot say the word “Dunkirk,” without tearing up in admiration for our plucky English “cousins,” there is openness in America, a willingness to be vulnerable that I wanted to honor. Many times people from other cultures have shared with me their surprise at how blunt we are as a nation. Our politics is tantamount to mud wrestling, our free press proclaims our every misstep; we’re a loud, brash culture, if one can call it a culture, and given the opportunity, we’ll tell the uncensored story of our lives to any stranger who will listen.. No, there’s nothing reticent about Americans. We’re ugly all right, but we want to be loved anyway.

And that, if I may be so immodest, is not only our vulnerability but also our strength. We want to embrace and be embraced; so we are always experimenting and digesting what we’ve learned. We live in the present because we haven’t much past. Without the glue of a mutual history, sometimes we tear ourselves apart. But we pull ourselves together again with renewed hope and a fresh vitality. I suppose we never will find our equilibrium for long, given our hodgepodge of disparate races, religions and traditions. We’ll keep on changing to accommodate our cacophony of views. But, I love that we keep trying to bring everyone into the tent… even if it takes a while. That’s my Heart Land."

Caroline Miller, 2009

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