The Seeds of Some Who Wander

Ever since I began keeping this blog, at the very start of our adventures on the road, friends have suggested that it would make an interesting book, and I agree. The sticking point is that I feel like I already wrote that book. It’s right here, and I don’t want to write it again.

If you’d like to read that story, you could start at the beginning of this blog (this post is called Leaving Today!) and read forwards. Or, I could feed all 828 posts into an AI tool and tell it to create a book about travel and adventure, but I’m not interested in doing that. Now, if several people were to ask, I could create a page with links to all the blog posts about travel (I’d cut the extemporaneous ones) in the order that I wrote them, maybe with headers of state names, which would be easier on the reader than having to keep track of where you are as you’re wading through posts. Ping me if that’s something you’d want.

Back to what I want, though. I want to write a new book. My new book is similar in that it is a memoir covering my five years on the road. And, it follows in the tradition of the great American travel memoirs where the narrator explores the country in order to find the self.

A Radical Memoir

In order to better mirror the internal journey, that’s not linear like the travel one, I’m using several fancy writing mechanisms. Let’s see here. If you’re really into this, here’s a long description of a radical memoir that I like quite a lot.

From: Writing the Radical Memoir: A Theoretical and Craft-based Approach, by Paul Williams and Shelley Davidow:

The radical memoir challenges and questions the assumptions readers and writers may have of the memoir genre. For example, can writers break the so-called reader/writer contract and still call the work a memoir? Can a writer move beyond the binaries of fact/fiction? These questions emerge out of other valid questions such as: do we actually remember things accurately and who gets to say what is true? What is memory? Is it a recall of data stored unchanged in some part of the brain, or is every memory an act of recreation of an experience? Who is the final arbiter of the claim that ‘this really happened?’ And more radically, does that matter and to whom and why? A writer writing memoir might be driven to explore one of the most fundamental questions of human experience, which is: what is the self? And do we reflect on and capture that self as we write, or do we create it as we write?

I really dig this stuff. Here’s my elevator pitch that I wrote quite a while ago and will not stick to, but I enjoyed writing it.

Some Who Wander is a radical memoir of two layers of exploration: a glimpse of life stripped of the distractions of attachment, immersed instead in place, experience, and reflection that reimagines the self. The core storyline follows a nomadic lifestyle, told in the present tense, one chapter per location (approx. 10)—together encompassing observations of this country, its people, the beauty of the land, interesting encounters—with an underlying arc of how the author’s understanding of her traveling lifestyle changes from flight to wandering. A mirror storyline, weaving between the travel chapters, is about navigating grief and growing self-awareness, told also as stories but in the past tense—describing previously crippling memories that lose their power in the telling. This inner arc and the outer arc continue as separate chapters braided together, spurring each other forward with subtle barbs, toward balance and self acceptance.  

Structure

That has been the plan for a while, to have two separate stories going at once: location-based and selfhood-based (that’s not a term I don’t think but whatever) with them referring to each other only rarely, but they both reflect change and growth at about the same rate, and in connected ways that only the careful reader will appreciate. That’s the plan, at least.

I really like how Hope Jahren does this in her book Lab Girl, where standard narrative chapters (about her struggles early in her career as a research scientist with bi-polar syndrome) are disrupted in a welcome way with chapters about biology, where she doesn’t mention herself at all. But those biology chapters share themes with the memoir ones, albeit subtle ones.

I was all fired up to write like this (and I have a good deal written), until I started reading a memoir about a couple whose sailboat capsized, stranding them on the open ocean in their dingy for something like four months. The thing I love about this memoir is that it’s told as fiction, and damn is it told well. Turns out it was first published as a memoir in 1973, and only recently was it retold as a work of fiction by a professional writer. It’s called, A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst, although I’d like to think I could do a smoother job weaving in the first-person journal writing with the third-person storytelling. But I always think I could do a better job; that’s why I was an editor, not a writer. In any case, telling this as fiction would free me up in ways I haven’t weighed yet.

So, now that I’m off the road and have a clear ending to go with my beginning, I may rethink my outline and verb tense switching and all the careful mechanisms I’d planned. What I like so far has been changing my mind as I’ve been thinking about the book. I sure do enjoy thinking about books, and so far I’m enjoyed thinking about my own book best of all.

Previous Beginning

In case you’ve not read this yet (I tested it out on so many of you willing guinea pigs), here is what I’d written to start the book. I’ve since changed my mind entirely, although I’m of course saving this in case I can use it elsewhere.

Chapter One

March 2020, Central Virginia

There are so many ways I could start this story. And guess what: I’ve tried them all.  I tried starting at the title to this chapter—the beginning of a new phase of my life—which seems like a smart place to start, right? But, I got caught up in the question: When does that story start, exactly? The day we drove away from my new husband’s house forever to live on the road? Or, before that, the day we bought what we would live in, our fancy new Airstream travel trailer? Or how about when the last of my family died, propelling me to thumb my nose at everything I’d known up to that point? When does a story start?

I could tell you what I know about stories that—you’d think—would help me out here. I could tell you about a paper I wrote in college on family story-telling, namely the differences in how my grandfather and my grandmother told their stories.  His were action-oriented: “Let me tell you about the time I was in a model-T that hit a tree, and I thought I’d gone blind, but really I had a bucket on my head.” A lot of them were self-deprecating, and we loved him even more for his laugh each time he told them. 

My grandmother’s stories were based on her senses. “Fall is my favorite time of year. I remember putting the laundry on the line outside—I used to dawdle so I could smell the air.” 

The one story they told together was about my great-grandparents working the family farm, and it had both action and the senses. “Agnes would be in the house, and Wheat would be out in the fields. Wheat would stand up and yell, ‘Agnes! The bread’s burning!’” 

I am 57 years old, and I still like to pipe up out of the blue with a grin, “Agnes! The bread’s burning!” That there is the essence of a good story. 

I have always been fascinated with the telling of stories.  After college, I wrote my graduate thesis on women narrating their pasts. Turns out you can alter your very self by telling your story in special ways, with tweaks here and there, with a curved paintbrush stroke instead of a jagged one. Isn’t that a marvelous idea? 

The only success I’ve had with telling a good story is to start with a blunt stroke. Here’s my claim to fame. As a break from studying women writers, I signed up for a seminar on Hamlet. This class was known to be a killer for digging in deep: you had to memorize all the lines before the first class.

And, for our final grade, we had to write a paper on one word in the play. One word. 

I picked the word, “bent.” Turns out you can explain pretty much everything in Hamlet by isolating each instance of “bent.” Seriously! I knew mine was a good paper, so when a friend asked to see it, I said, “Sure.” And I looked up to this guy: not only did he get into the MFA program when I did not, but he played a better game of pool. And I wasn’t bad.  

He just glanced at my paper. 

“Damn! I’ve been dancing around for three pages trying to introduce my word, and here’s yours in your first sentence!”

What does this say about me, that I can contribute to the analysis of one of the most widely read pieces in the Western World using one word, but here I am dancing around the start of my own story?  

Where is my blunt stroke? What even is my word? Is it travel? Adventure? Nature? Grief? Love? None of these is as easy to start with as “bent,” I gotta say. 

But then, maybe “bent” really is my word. Maybe any word can be your word if you write your story from a far-enough distance, if you use all your senses to understand it, if, like my family before me, you stop working long enough to stand up and smell what’s on the wind. 

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My story is, in part, the story of this country, and there are many stories I could tell you about this country that I’ve gleaned from five years on the road. I’ll warn you, though: most of it boils down to what we all already know. What’s truly amazing is that I didn’t believe any of it until I saw it. Maybe I thought some of it had been true but was no longer, or maybe I thought it was all a myth. This is a trick of stories: they can be true. 

For example, in Texas, cowboys—actual cowboys—will park a truck and horse trailer across from a BBQ joint and walk through the banging screen door with their spurs on. 

In Southern California at dawn, blond teenagers will zoom through the campground on their skateboards, racing to beat each other to the morning waves, with their surf boards under their tanned arms.

In Iowa at the intersection of long, straight roads in the middle of fields as far as you can see, two drivers will stop with rolled-down windows so they can have a conversation, probably about not much. When another car comes by, they won’t honk; they’ll stop to talk about nothing, too. 

In Arizona, the green saguaros stand tall with their arms up (just like the emojis!), and, if you’re lucky, you might see perched on top of one the regal crested caracara, the bird of Aztec legend.  

In the green waters off the Florida Keys, schools of spotted eagle rays hunt in the current under bridges, and the chance of seeing them glide under your kayak in geometric formation for just a few seconds is worth battling that current, day after day. 

In Alaska are actual wild wolves, and they’ll listen and sniff and stare at you on the trail until they’ve gleaned all the info they need, and then they’ll trot away, at which point you’ll realize you had your camera in your hands and never even took a danged picture. 

I know that these things are all, amazingly, true, because I’ve seen them for myself. And, these stories all weave in and out of my story.

Moving On

But, that’s not my new plan. My new planned beginning is much more specific, much more personal, and my new structure is not the same, either.

If you’re thinking I’ll never get this done because I’ve already scrapped so much, note that one way to look at it is that I’ve already written so much, really a first book (this blog) and a first draft of a second book (what I’ve been working on separately up until now). This next draft will be much better.