"We're going to put a stake in the ground and say this place matters."

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The year is 2002. We're in Blytheville, Arkansas and 18-year old Luke Pruett has just graduated from high school. In a couple of months, he'll be leaving his hometown of about 15,000 people to go to college in Jackson, Tennessee. Up to this point, Luke's led a pretty small town life. He's never been on a plane, he's never been to the ocean, and all that's about to change. What he doesn't realize is that this move will set him on a 13-year a quest. A journey to challenge an assumption that many 20 and 30 somethings like me just take for granted, that life in the city is where it's at. That journey will take Luke on a nearly 8,000 mile road trip, to the heart of a capitalist yet socialist dinner club, and most importantly, to the subject of a Johnny Cash song. So, if you like me have ever uttered the words, "Ugh, the suburbs," buckle up for an episode all about place and our favorite buzz word community.

My name is Ngofeen Mputubwele and you're listening to The Power Is Out. A podcast that tells the stories of 20 and 30 somethings engaging the people and problems around them.

Today's story unfolds in two parts. Part One, I'm Going to Jackson. Part Two, Podcasting your Place.

Luke Pruett as you probably figured out is the main character of our story.

Luke: I'm a Delta kid, as in the Southeast United States. I grew up in a little town called Blytheville, Arkansas.

Luke spent almost his entire life living in and around the Mississippi Delta, but what you may not know is that Jackson, that town he moved to for college, that's my hometown.

NM: Tell me about Jackson? Because I know about Jackson, and you know about Jackson, but probably 75% of the people listening have no idea about Jackson.

Luke: This is the home of rockabilly.

NM: What is rockabilly?

Luke: Exactly.

I moved to Jackson, Tennessee in 7th grade. It's where I went to middle school and high school, it's where my folks live. Jackson's population is about 70,000 and it's about 2 hours from Nashville and an hour from Memphis.

Luke: It's in Western Tennessee which is a semi-hilly part of the country. It's like the gateway to Tennessee becoming what people think of Tennessee as.

It's got a minor league baseball team, a couple of colleges, a Panera. It's a lot bigger than Blytheville, Arkansas, but it's not a big huge city. It's something more in between. But, most importantly Jackson, Tennessee is the place that Johnny Cash was singing about in the song, Jackson.

Luke: If you want to argue with this anyone out there, then I can show you video proof. June's joking on an NBC show about Johnny being in Jackson, Tennessee with Carl Perkins.

I met up with Luke when I was home visiting my parents. We met at this place called, The CO. It's this restaurant turned co-working space in Jackson. Luke came in sporting a flatbill hat and a back pack. He's got bright red hair, a gregarious personality and a mischievous grin. It was pretty obvious early on that talking to him would be a lot of fun. Luke's actually 33 now, but our conversation centered on the move that he made when he was 18, and how that changed the next decade of his life.

It all starts with Luke's freshman year at Union University in Jackson. There, he becomes friends with this ragtag band of college guys, one of whom drove a mini van.

Luke: We had a 93 Aerostar and my good friend Nathan Michael who's 6'7". He looks like the Norwegian dream -- blue eyes, blond hair, just a hilarious guy. He got his family's mini-van. We went on a road trip to Dallas, and when we got back, it was so much fun we're like, "Let's do this more.

And so the travels begin in that same mini-van. Now, to give you a mental picture here, a 93 Aerostar, it's one of those vans your parents drove you to soccer practice to back in the 90s. So imagine four college guys pile into this mini van.

Luke: And over the course of the next three years we went to 49 states.

Naturally, they drive across the country. On weekends, on holidays, skipping classes every once in a while. They went to California.

Luke: Slept on the beach in San Diego.

Traveled to the North East.

Luke: Went through the largest snow storm at that time that it occurred in the decade.

And for the grand finale, in case you missed it.

NM: You said you guys went to 49 states? You drove to Alaska?

Luke: We drove to Alaska.

NM: You did not drive to Alaska from Jackson, Tennessee.

Luke: Yeah, me and my buddy tore his ACL, and he needed to have surgery, that was the medically responsible thing to do. Two of us were engaged and so we were kind of like hedging anyway. We really didn't want to do it, and we'd already done 48 and it just felt like, "You know, let's just call it." But man, our guy Tony, he was not going to not go. He postponed ACL surgery, which I think still has repercussions for his knee to this day, and we went, and we drove up there. It was crazy.

NM: Oh, my gosh, that's crazy. You drove to Alaska from Jackson, Tennessee?

Luke: In a 93 Aerostar, with 300,000 miles on it. Yeah, it was crazy.

NM: Oh, my gosh.

Luke: Yeah, it was the dumbest.

All those college troubles changed Luke a lot. He starts going overseas: France, Honduras, Mexico. By 2006, senior year has rolled around, and he's faced with a pretty significant choice. A choice that to understand the weight of you've got to picture what it's like to be a senior in college.

It's spring, it's warm and people are getting ready to go places. You've spent the last four, or five, or maybe six years of your life living in this town, and now your friends are moving off. To start their first job, to do teach for America, go backpack around Europe. And in this environment, faced with the choice between your college town and going elsewhere, what would you do?

Now, you'd expect that for a guy like Luke, a guy with this newfound love of travel, you'd think that the decision would be pretty clear: Go! But no. He stays. Plus, it wasn't just Luke. A lot of his friends, many of whom were in that same ragtag band, they stay too. And the thing is, most of them aren't from Jackson, so it's not like they're staying because they've grown up there, or their family is there. That would make sense. Which raises the question, why stay? This is what I was curious about, and the answer I found was a whole lot deeper than I've expected: community.

When I think of community two basic ideas come to mind. First is good times with friends, like all of Luke's crazy road trips in college. Second, is the idea of living life together. In the first few years of Luke's life in Jackson post-grad, there was a bit of that. The best example is the dinner co-op he and his friends started.

Luke: It started out honestly for very practical purposes. I mean, we wanted to be communal, we wanted to be cool, but we were all really broke and had a lot of kids, like tons and tons and tons of kids.

Did I mention that Luke got married by the way? Shout out to April Pruett. And pretty soon they had kids.

Luke: This felt like a way we could eat really well.

NM: What was your normal routine?

Luke: Man, if you're listening to this, you need to cancel dinner plans, and call your friends, and start doing this. It's called Food For All. The concept is perfectly based in socialism and capitalism at the same time. It's communal but it's also a closed circuit. There's a certain number of people that are involves so it's predictable how many people are going to be at dinner.

Four nights a week, Monday through Thursday this group of friends would get together and have dinner at each others houses. They'd rotate from house to house.

Luke: You used the classic food scheduling, takethemameal.com, schedule when your meals are going to be.

Each person is responsible for three meals every six week.

Luke: In return, you get 21 free meals.

You can pick up dinner and go, or if the host is cool with it, folks can stay and hang out.

Luke: The best thing about it is that it ensures that you see each other consistently. Because if you don't work with somebody, or you're not in an organization with them, or a religious service, or whatever, you can go a couple of weeks without seeing your friends, and your whole life can change over the course of two, three, seven days. We were literally living life together, living those changes together, it was beautiful.

Of course this whole living life together thing isn't just about the good times. For Luke and company, those group dinners persisted throughout the hard times as well. Broken relationships, family illness, conflict with friends. It's that persistence of friendship through good and bad that makes communities such a fulfilling idea, and yet for Luke there end up to be more to it than that. This was tied in part to help people who would talk about Jackson.

Luke: All these people would say, "I love my friends, I love my life here, man, this town sucks." I'm like that's incongruent, like how can that thing be?

These were the questions Luke would spend the next few years mulling over, trying to figure out. What makes a place valuable? In a minute, how podcasting in Jackson leads to unintended consequence. More when we get back.

It's 2012, and Luke has been living in Jackson for about 10 years now working at Union where he went to school. Now, after several years of working in residence life he decides to make a career change and go to law school. A decision that came with some fear and uncertainty.

Luke: I think at the time worst case scenario, very much looked like, I make a big deal out of going to law school, people get really excited about, that feels monumental to people around you, and then I just can't hack it, I just can't make the grade or whatever. Then like, can my wife trust me? What if I fail at this? What if I get a semester in and it didn't work out? How's that going to go? Those kind of fears.

Luke and his wife April start looking at law schools, but seeing as there're no law school in Jackson, the closest one is an hour away in Memphis, they're going to have to move away, but then something happens.

Luke: I had a really good friend whose dad was in a terrible car accident, and so we started a charity basketball tournament to raise funds for the family. Right as I was about to apply to all these law schools this tournament was going on, and my oldest son who was three at the time, or two. He was running around the gym and everybody there knew him and loved him, and there's 100 people there and my wife and I looked at each other like, "How could we ever leave this?"

Luke and April decide to stay in Jackson. And it's not that Luke wasn't going to go to law school. He was going to go. It's just that he gets in at the University of Memphis and then lives in Jackson, commuting an hour each way for three years. Which means lots of time to listen and think. As the semesters pass Luke's listening to podcasts a lot, reading a lot, and soon it's almost like this theme begins to emerge in the things he's taking in: the beauty of the mundane, the ordinary places.

He hears it in the podcast, This American Life, sees it on Choose 901, this blog in Memphis that's building pride in the city. He reads it in the works of Wendell Berry, a professor who leaves New York to go back to his family land in Kentucky, and writes a lot about the idea of place. And so Luke tries to start finding the stories in the places where he is--in Jackson.

Jim: Welcome to Our Jackson Home, front porch discussions without the front porch. Today on the board we have my partner in mic, I guess you would say, Luke Pruett.

Luke: Yes, yes.

This is Our Jackson Home, a podcast that Luke and his friend Jim started to tell the stories of Jacksonians.

Jim: We'd like to introduce our guest here today: author, sculptor, painter, musician, song writer, all around renaissance man, Mr. Craig Davis. How are you doing, Craig?

Craig: Just fine, Jim. How are you?

Luke and Jim start talking to them about their stories, how they ended up in Jackson, and what they realize is that Jackson is actually this well spring of deep thinkers, artists, writers. It's just that for many of them it's not their day job.

Luke: With that being said, Just The Sea, tell us a little bit about this song.

Craig: Well, the song is based on a Tennyson poem. It's about a man who's got this wonderful young wife, and he's a sailor, and he gets ship wrecked on an island. He's gone, he's stuck on this island for like 10 years and then he's finally picked up, And he goes back home, and he spots his wife. She's off with another man and there's children there and basically he turns around and walks away. The song kind of came out of that applied to a more modern time.

Luke: All right here's Lord Tennyson, I mean Craig Davis, with Just The Sea.

After the first interview, Luke and Jim post the audio online.

Luke: Somehow a few people found it, listened to it, and I was like, "Ah, it's ..." Then we did another one, and it was fun. And then at that point, it just got addicting to where we just did nine of them. Jim meanwhile was behind the scenes, calling the newspaper, and letting them know this thing was happening. I mean the name just kind of came to me, just like a fun name, a way of owning this place, like we're going to put a stake in the ground and say this place matters, and it's awesome, so people began to rally around that.

People like Katie Howerton, a senior at Union University who ends up helping Our Jackson Home to create its own magazine featuring short stories, essays, poems, and interviews with local business owners. Like Luke, Katie had had her own evolution and her own understanding of community.

Katie: Community is never a word I used growing up. Now, I can't imagine explaining it or someone not understanding what community is because I've experienced it so much in Jackson. There's this kind of commonality of "we just both live here," but also there's commonality of "we live here, and we're going to act like we do."

I feel like something's is in the water with the young people right now. College kids who step outside of their comfort zone and get into the town ask the question like, "What if people are more important than where I am?"

I think that's kind of what I had to learn is my whole college experience I had said, "I want to go to this cool places," and I was thinking even about making a travel magazine, and I would write up all these little blurbs about travel. And I kept coming to the conclusion of the value of a place is based on the value of its people, and every place has people and every person is valuable. I just had this realization that the whole time I had been here I had been what I thought was downplaying the city, but really was downplaying the people that have built it.

There was one question I wanted to ask Katie though.

NM: What do you do with the cynical listener that says like, "Okay, so Our Jackson Home is basically a bunch of hipsters get together, and like hipsterize the city, and then it's great--community."

Katie: Honestly, that was a big tension I had and that has been a big fear of mine. I mean, it's been tricky but what I really hope is instead of hipsterizing people is that I hopefully dignify them. You know my friend Charlie, who we did a piece on in this last magazine, when he sees a drawing of him on the cover, when he sees his frame shop that is really just this little place on the side of the road that not a lot of the people my age know about. It looks like this beautiful place that it actually is, because I have a talented photographer going there. I have a talented writer asking him questions and artfully putting them together. We hope that it makes people feel really proud of what they do, and where they live.

By nine months into the project, Our Jackson Home has become this vehicle for writers, photographers, teachers, parents, all types of people who express why it is they live where they do.

NM: When did you, or how did you realize that it was starting to stick, like it was working kind of?

Luke: I think the fact that I was pursuing really talented people to be on our podcast, and everyone of them said yes every single time. Sometimes I didn't really know them that well either. And we did it on Saturday morning in a tiny little house in midtown and ... I don't know. It's weird to go over somebody's house you don't know that well. It's not a very 21st century thing to ever happen. I don't know if everyone who we invited, our first 12 or so guests, even really listened to podcasts. But man, people were excited that someone was excited about them. Then they would come in to the room with some hesitancy and some obvious feelings of they're doing this out of charity almost in a way. Like, "Uh, you know, these guys, I'll give them a shot." Then by the end of our hour with them, they were moved.

That was just cool. That I just knew was meaningful, and I knew I wanted to spend a large portion of the rest of my life doing that.

By the time Our Jackson Home is in full swing, it is Luke's last semester of law school, meaning he's thinking about post-graduation. His plans are pretty straight forward: work at a law firm at Jackson where he's got a job lined up and work on Our Jackson Home, among other things. Just as things are going well, everything is coming together, Luke gets thrown a curve ball. Shortly after graduation Luke finds himself at dinner with this guy named, John Carroll, the director of an organization in Memphis called, City Leadership.

City Leadership is the organization that had created Choose 901, that blog in Memphis that Luke liked so much and helped inspire the idea of Our Jackson Home. John, the director, pitches an idea to Luke. "Why don't you come join our team?" In other words, you know of that community building stuff you like, why don't you come do it in Memphis for a living?

For Luke that offer is the dream. Using all these things he's been developing since he got to Jackson, caring for a specific place and its problems. But still, Luke's spent the last 13 years of his life at this point trying to articulate why life in Jackson is valuable, and just as he starts being able to do that, here comes an offer to leave. He's faced with this choice, pursue this passions that inspire me, or stay in this community that I love. It's not unlike 9 years earlier when Luke had had the choice of staying in Jackson after graduation or pursuing a new adventure elsewhere. That time Luke had chosen to stay. This time he decides to go.

Luke told me it was a pretty hard decision to make. Taking the job meant leaving a group of friends that had become family in a place that he generally loved, but it also meant pursuing a new opportunity that seems right. I can relate to that feeling. Still, like me Luke carries along Jackson with him wherever he goes.

Luke: The people of this place, particularly the people that mentored me are so into the fabric of myself. In the same way that when I look at my sons I see my father and mother, and I see my wife's father and mother, in their behavior, in their interests I see my mentors from this place. They are them, many of whom they've spent really minimal time with but I'm them. That's the way that Jackson changed my life.

There's a certain irony in Luke's story, that by caring for one place he ends up going to another, but that irony isn't lost on Luke. I think what's intriguing to me is that it actually fits into his understanding of community. That that community you care for, that place it can change.

Luke: And the place I've really come to now is, it doesn't really matter where the place is, and it doesn't have to be the place you grew up. I think one of the things that Berry actually emphasizes too much is this forefathers concept. A lot of people don't have the option of forefathers, where they're presently at. You have to flee a country, or you don't have a ton of money, or you went to college in another place. And so we don't need to rewrite our histories to where the place we grew up is the only place we can ever thrive. Rather, if you're in a place for a moment, for a long period of time, for a lifetime, whatever, you should try to make that place better during that time which you're there. That's how a place matters. I think ultimately the way in which we love ourselves, the way in which we love our friends, the way in which we love our enemies, the way in which we love our family, the best is by caring for a place.