What came next

The second chapter (and second paid post) of how two floods gave birth to a book

Last month, in my first paid post “How it all began” I talked about one of the flood stories that has accompanied me for a while now—Hurricane Agnes, one of the most devastating storms ever to hit the Southern Tier and the Finger Lakes, along with wide swaths of the rest of the eastern United States. I left off with a bit of a cliffhanger about my car drowning in a 1000-year flood.

As I said in that post, I talk a lot about that flood in an essay for Still: The Journal, but I’ll recap the basics here. In late July 2022, I went to my first even in-person Appalachian Writers’ Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, having attended online back in 2020. After a rough start due to impostor syndrome, I settled in and began to make friends. It would have been perfect but for the rain. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much rain in so short a time, and I lived in Rennes, where in winter especially it rains more days than not.

Screen capture from https://www.holiday-weather.com/rennes/averages/. At its wor…