Many of you as first-year writers at the University of Michigan are doing many things at once – leaving home and what you have understood to be “the known,” perhaps trying out new personas, meeting people with whom you share no common ground, and all the while managing to write a twelve page paper for the first time. For perhaps the first time you are encountering objects, phenomena, or experiences with which you flat out disagree, but cannot pinpoint why it feels so foreign to you. Even still, beyond you and your worldview, there is a world history and an American history that cycles through a love and appreciation of what we might consider “foreign” or unknowable to us, and a deep ambivalence that manifests itself in identity-based violence such as xenophobia, homophobia, classism, sexism, and racism. A crucial part of undoing and rebuilding from these violences is defining for yourself how your home(s) has defined you, what home looks like for those we perceive to be “other” to us, and what similarities are produced between us when we collectively leave home. As such, This course will take as its theme various conceptualizations of home, and the narratives of those who take home as their central reason for writing, speaking, or producing texts. The characteristics we may take as foundational to home such as comfort, stability, and privacy will be complicated by those who find a home in discomfort, contradiction, and placelessness. We will read across genre (poetry, short stories, oratory, autobiographical writing, and nonfiction essays) as well as multimedia texts (online miniseries, podcasts, music videos, and documentary film). Some of the manifestations of home we will engage include – but are not limited to – leaving home, new homes, home as place/space, identity homes, home as (chosen) family, cultural homelessness, language homes, and haunted houses.