Homing Instincts

January 30, 2017
Menkedick, a native Midwesterner, spent her 20s traveling around the globe alone, seeking out landscapes and people different from her home. Whether she was picking grapes in France or teaching English on Réunion Island, Menkedick was “using myself like a Monopoly piece, moving around the globe to acquire experience and knowledge.” At 31, she and her husband moved back home to live in a small cabin on her family’s farm in Ohio and have a baby. Menkedick’s intensely intimate collection of essays chronicles her journey from early adulthood, as a young woman who “confused travel with experience and experience with self-definition” into maturity. She beautifully depicts the physiological changes and emotional battles that took place in her mind and body as she and her husband adjusted to their new sedentary life. Menkedick is a superb storyteller and her writing is filled with remarkable scientific and literary references. She explores her reinvigorated relationship with the Midwestern landscape, seeing quiet beauty in an environment she once longed to leave behind. She details the normal day-to-day tensions between her and her husband during the pregnancy. She takes comfort in her close family relationships while contemplating her new identity as a pregnant woman and mother-to-be. This is a moving and deeply personal look at one woman’s transformation.

April 1, 2017
An account of the author's transition from wandering spirit to anchored, responsible mother.The idea of taking a gap year after high school, before entering college, is fairly recent but also increasingly common for students, many of whom take time to travel. Engaging in that most liberal of educations ostensibly provides a rounding to the education received from textbooks and in classrooms. Some students find it suits them so well that a year stretches into two, or, in the case of Vela magazine founder Menkedick, nearly a decade. After receiving a degree in the history of science, the author traveled around the world, teaching English as a second language, working odd jobs, and always seeking new opportunities for travel, "the lines of my journeys tentative, then picking up speed, arching across the planet, pulsing on obscure islands." Drawing from the experiences and writings of Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Louise Erdrich, Anne Enright, and other writers, Menkedick erases and redraws parts of herself as she experiences greater self-understanding, weighing values and goals against those of others in her family. She finds that her writing, previously fueled by travel, comes to serve as a stand-in for traveling itself. The natural world around her in rural Ohio provided significant opportunities for reassessment, and she embraced the entirely different journey of pregnancy and motherhood. Menkedick's writing is insightful and evocative, drawing on all the senses, and readers will be impressed by the sense of place in her writing, even while she's laboring to discern the meaning in her experience. Menkedick's driving question is to figure out "whether returning home signifies growing up or giving up or both--and if it's both, what exactly we want to give up in exchange for what." The magic of this book is that she makes so personal a question so easily accessible to readers.

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April 1, 2017
Following nearly a decade spent traveling the globe, writer Menkedick finds herself back on her father's farm, newly pregnant and struggling with the concept of settling down. After years of looping around and around, seeking and finding and striking out again, I come to understand under an Ohio sky . . . the singular circularity of my search. This feeling of movement comes through in her writing, and the reader must be patient as Menkedick thoughtfully considers her life's evolution. Her meditations on pregnancy shift like the tide as she propels herself outward, recalling past travels, and then draws inward, reflecting on her newfound stillness. As a new mother, Menkedick strives to hold on to her artist lifestyle despite the pressure of today's parenting conventions, hoping instead to live slowly and in the moment with her young family. This is the mystery: moments of calm knowing that contain within them nothing larger than the everyday. Menkedick's first book gracefully encourages careful introspection and finding one's true self and place among the everyday moments.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)