This article reviews some of the work of rhetoric and composition scholars in discussions of place, and to enhance awareness of how place-related factors may limit and/or bolster pedagogies, it presents a case study of two geographically and culturally different student writers at Ohio University. This study describes some of the challenges that confront college students, variously associated with rural Appalachia, who take first-year composition among predominantly urban and suburban Midwestern peers. Although no two borderlands are the same, descriptive research concerning how members of one borderland negotiate their sense of place with academic writing may allow for teaching and theorizing that transcend the hills of Athens, Ohio.