We move for love or jobs or wanderlust -- almost 12 times in our lives, on average. We can check live webcams around the world while on the phone with mom back home. So what does it mean to have a sense of place in our lives?

"It's vital to us," said Freya Manfred, a poet and writer who comes by her thoughts on the topic by both experience and lifeblood. Her father, the late novelist Frederick Manfred, set many of his stories in the region around his hometown of Luverne, Minn. Freya Manfred, 63, has led a more mobile life, although her latest move from northern Minnesota to western Wisconsin was driven in part by missing her old Twin Cities stomping grounds, "of missing the weddings and funerals and talking with other writers."

On Friday night, she and Minnesota writer and poet Bill Holm will lead an evening of poetry, music and conversation as they explore the importance of place in "Finding Home: The Geography of Heart," an event hosted by Arcola Mills and ArtReach Alliance of the St. Croix Valley.

"There are so many different ways that language can be brought alive, but there is a kind of poetry or memory that really is a poetry of place and, for some writers, an important way of participating in the life around us," Manfred said.

She talked about the concept of "a genius of place," in which certain favorite places make an almost palpable connection, "where the place comes to you as a presence -- almost moves toward you -- and because of the feelings you've accumulated about it, we say it's sacred ground."

It's often a challenge to put feelings into words, she said, because the sensations are so deep. "There is a certain private, rich, energetic sense of life we get in certain places," she said. She's a passionate champion of the outdoors. "It's a larger world outdoors, offering freedom and privacy and fantasy and some things that are frightening, but also ecstatic."

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Bill Holm

Still, she added with a laugh, special places aren't always fraught with profound underpinnings. "I know some people in New York who just come alive when they walk into a particular bar."

Kim Ode • 612-673-7185