Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

by Sarah Menkedick Narrated by Sarah Menkedick

Overview

Fresh, intimate, and radiantly meditative, Homing Instincts is the story of one woman's “coming of age” as a first-time parent on her family's rural Ohio farm.

After teaching English to recalcitrant teenagers on Reunion Island, picking grapes in France, and witnessing a revolution in Mexico, Sarah Menkedick, at thirty-one, embarks on what might become her most challenging adventure yet: she moves into a tiny, nineteenth-century cabin on her family's farm and prepares to become a mother. She never expected to want this kind of settled life, and yet she finds a new peace and inspiration in the surrounding natural world as she and her husband, Jorge, prepare for the exciting unknown.

Menkedick juxtaposes the progress of her pregnancy and the larger questions it inspires with recollections of her family history; being raised by a single and unapologetically hippie father; her paternal grandmother, Millie, whose Midwestern German fortitude informed the character of the next two generations; and her husband Jorge's loving but difficult childhood in Oaxaca, Mexico. Altogether, it becomes a luminous portrait of the time just before and after new motherhood.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

01/30/2017
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. (May)

From the Publisher

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY

"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." —Publishers Weekly

"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." —Kirkus

"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." —Booklist

"In the eight essays that comprise this poignant, probing memoir, Menkedick contemplates the mysteries of motherhood and the surprising pleasures of establishing a permanent home—a place where she can write, reflect and prepare for the arrival of her daughter. 'For the first time, I recognize this delving into my own heart, mind, and body as a journey,' she says. This revealing book is a lovely exercise in self-inquiry that will resonate with mothers-to-be."–Bookpage
"This debut breaks any existing stereotype of memoir about pregnancy and motherhood. The eight long essays are meandering, smart, and packed with cultural, literary, and scientific references. It is a long trek through the mind of the author, whose stunning intellect is matched by her initial resistance to the insights she eventually gains. Readers get to wade through her stubbornness, how enamored she has been with her previous lifestyle—traveling the world, going to China on a whim, being unfettered—and then experience her agitation with the realities of pregnancy and motherhood—a trip from which there is no return." —New York Journal of Books

“An emotionally raw, tender, and hauntingly precise meditation of impending motherhood, Homing Instincts put me under its spell and brought me such joy. This is a book that makes me want to take a walk in the woods with my dog and rediscover solitude. Menkedick wrestles with what it means to be home, and redefines herself while wandering fiercely toward the unfamiliar in this stunning debut collection.” —Jeanne Marie Laskas, best-selling author of Concussion 
 
“A bold and lyric debut, Homing Instincts is a rapturous meditation on motherhood and modern femininity. Poetic in its prose, Menkedick explores the corners of our globe both near and far, offering heart, humor, and grace.” —Amy Butcher, author of Visiting Hours 

Kirkus Reviews

2017-03-15
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169906257
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	05/02/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

HOMING INSTINCTS
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Homing Instincts"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Sarah Menkedick.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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