I have walked one part of the Robert Frost Trail here in Amherst for years. I know the boulders at the trail head, the skunk cabbage and horse tail ferns in the spring, the gold aspen leaves in the fall, the little bridge over the stream and the flat rocks that lead down to the water’s edge. It’s a familiar path that includes a wide meadow and overarching oaks. Today while walking in a neighborhood on the other side of town, I came upon a different trailhead for the same trail. I stopped in my tracks and wondered how the two sections connect. I tried to imagine but couldn’t make them meet. A map would show me, but I wouldn’t feel it or fully understand it. There was nothing to do but walk it, cross the dry ravines, step over roots, get diverted behind back yards and to know how this part is included in the whole. Only then would I understand what this part of the Robert Frost Trail means to me.
Novels and memoirs are trails too. We can be very familiar with long segments of it, travel them back and forth as we write, but often there is at least one section or tributary that seems disjointed or cut off even though we know it’s very much a chapter or scene that is somehow connected and needs to be included. How do we make it fit? How do we follow the moments and show their partnership with the roots and geology of the rest of the story?
We walk it. It’s fine to map a story with index cards or Venn diagrams, or outlines, but until that segment is written out, perhaps multiple times, and explored fully both ends won’t coalesce and speak to each other. Trekking every part of the narrative trail allows all the intermediary scenes to make their contribution to the full meaning. And along the way, specific fallen logs, wasp galls, and overstory openings to the sky display the full evolution of the story. Readers then become hiking companions as they walk the trail along every bit if its topography and habitat.
Publications
Maud & Addie “Sure to enchant, Maud & Addie is a touching novel complete with old skeletons, new friends, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” Vivian Turnbull, Foreword Reviews. To purchase: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/maud-and-addie/
blessed are the menial chores “Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.” Sue Brannan Walker, poet laureate of Alabama 2003 – 2012. Purchase here: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/author/
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