Notes from Home

Notes from Home weaves a tapestry of personal stories from a group of youth who have experienced family insecurity during childhood. At Rutgers University, the Price Family Fellows Program provides financial, emotional, and academic support for students who seek to steer their own narratives and achieve their dreams through education. Eight graduates of the program now share reflections, photographs, and memories in search of new, often surprising meanings of home and family.
 
Through portraiture, oral history, writing, and family archives, the contributors explore childhood, geography, immigration, education, and family relationships, recovering misunderstood or overlooked moments. In the process of making this work, the group found old family photos, returned to sites of significance, and made new friendships, discovering the transformational potential of this kind of storytelling to reframe hardship, loss, and uncertainty. In the words of one contributor, “I felt like this process was a necessary step that allowed me to acknowledge and comprehend what I was experiencing at the time. It allowed me to create a more coherent understanding that I am who I am because of my past and because I was the one who had control of molding my own, better path.” Each chapter, encompassing one person’s story, is strikingly unique in its vision and approach.

This beautifully illustrated volume weaves together personal stories, photographs, drawings, poems of students who have experienced insecurity during childhood into a tapestry of memories about the meaning of home.

JONNA McKONE is a Baltimore-based artist, filmmaker, and photographer. Her work, spanning video, photography, and time-based media, has received numerous awards and grants and has been shown in galleries, museums, and film festivals, as well as heard on public radio stations and podcasts.
 
The contributors to this book are all recent graduates of Rutgers University as well as LIM College.

Introduction
Dios
K'La
Anthony
Mahogany
Autumn
Mariah
Stephanie
Gisell
A Lifetime of Moments
Epilogue

"In Notes From Home, Jonna McKone takes us all with her and her eight traveling companions – formerly homeless or foster care youth – on a journey of exploration across the landscape of their individual lives, as each of them searches for the meaning of home. They draw, photograph, write, and remember, and along the way also manage to redefine what home means not only for themselves but for the rest of us as well. These are just the kinds of transformational stories and images we need to hear and see as our nation looks for ways to support young people who have fallen outside the safety net."

"In Notes From Home, Jonna McKone takes us all with her and her eight traveling companions – formerly homeless or foster care youth – on a journey of exploration across the landscape of their individual lives, as each of them searches for the meaning of home. They draw, photograph, write, and remember, and along the way also manage to redefine what home means not only for themselves but for the rest of us as well. These are just the kinds of transformational stories and images we need to hear and see as our nation looks for ways to support young people who have fallen outside the safety net."