With his new book, "Dreaming of Columbus, A Boyhood in the Bronx," Michael Pearson the writer has finally come home.

In a memoir that recalls his youth and the Bronx of the 1950s and '60s, the associate professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program found his inner voice and discovered he is now ready to write a novel.

"This book was a culmination of what I've been trying to do for about a decade," Pearson said. "It landed me back where I thought at 21 I should have been Ð writing a fiction piece."

In "Dreaming," Pearson uses recollection and reportage to recreate the place of his youth. Both comical and sad, the book juxtaposes descriptions of adolescent escapades with the grim discipline of parochial schools. It is in this Bronx that dreams of escape fuse with bittersweet memories.

"The book looks at what it was like to be a kid with my inclinations and interests in the Bronx in the '60s," he explained. "It was claustrophobic. There were lots of barriers in Catholic schools for kids like me and I was constantly learning outside of the context. I was always imagining myself out of that situation."

Hence, the book's title. In his opening chapter, Pearson quotes a song by Mary Black that reads:

It is a book, he said, about growing up and the universal image of getting outside of where you started.

The author of "Imagined Places: Journeys into Literary America," "A Place That's Known: Essays" and "John McPhee," Pearson noted that all of his books have been about the inclination and the habit of writing and being a writer.

"I started out in a reportorial vein, looking to go out into the world and report what I saw. With 'A Place That's Known' I tried to get closer to what my real voice was, to get closer to what I was interested in reading myself," said Pearson, explaining his progression as a writer. He added that this memoir allowed him to recount the facts but use his inner voice to craft a story.

The driving force behind "Dreaming" is its people - his mother and father, the boys and girls in his neighborhood and his writing teacher Ð and the books that make escape and return seem possible. One book in particular, a biography of Columbus which Pearson describes as having been on permanent loan from the library, helped shape his boyhood notions of escape and dreams of other worlds.

"It was a love-hate relationship" with the Bronx, he explained, "one that I wished to escape from. But at the same time, as I look back on it, it was a pastoral world compared to the world most of us live in right now."

"Dreaming of Columbus, A Boyhood in Bronx," which will be released in March by Syracuse University Press, is the inaugural volume in the new series New York City History and Culture, which will emphasize literature, anthologies, collections of essays, nonfiction and scholarly works.

Pearson, who has taught American literature and nonfiction writing at Old Dominion since 1988, has also published essays and stories in The New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Journal of American Culture, The Southern Literary Journal, Creative Nonfiction and culturefront, among others. His first book, "Imagined Places," was listed by The New York Times Book Review as one of the notable books of 1991.