From Notebooks to Book

The journey continues in paid subscriber post #3

In April’s paid post, I described how I went from witnessing (and losing a car to) a 1000-year flood to talking with an editor about my first book. It is one thing, however, to decide to write a book. It is another to sit down and figure out how to write it.

One idea I had was to start with my grandmother’s columns, many of which I would eventually get from family. The first wave however, came when I visited the Kanestio Historical Society (KHS) for the first time in December 2022.

Kanestio Historical Society, Canisteo, NY. All photos in this post by the author.

While that was a great start, many of the columns were undated and a few were incomplete. Then, a few months later, my uncle gave me envelopes of Ruth’s writing that included one labeled “columns for book.” We knew this was something she had wanted, but until that moment, no one had any idea how that might look. Could this set of columns provide an organizing principle for my own book?

Spoiler alert: nope.

I could not discern what held this particular set of writings together. If I had to guess, I’d say Ruth was trying to assemble a calendar year’s worth of columns in the same vein as Hal Borland’s Book of Days, based on his “daily reflections” in the New York Times, or Ken Weber’s Wanderings, taken from his weekly columns in The Providence Journal’s Sunday magazine.

Guesses, however, only get a person so far, so I went back to what I’d been doing, even as I continued reading and scanning the columns—I wrote. I wrote whatever jumped into my head about the flood, about Hurricane Agnes, about my relationship with my grandparents, about my ancestors, about our family’s relationship with the land and with (northern) Appalachia.

I wasn’t writing the actual book yet. I was writing to discover what the book would be about. “Grandma and I experienced massive floods 50 years apart” is a decent hook, but it is not a book.