For me, this was a difficult book to read and digest. One reviewer said they didn't have much in common with the writer. But I had a lot in common with the write, being Christian, driving long distances, having moved a number of times. Still, her experiences were different, being in the West and Midwest, being on the plains and the long, long distances she drove across the open expanses, sleeping the rest stops. I admired her grit and independence. But I admit that I had difficult finishing the book. ( )

“Home is the Road:Wandering the Land, Shaping the Spirit” by Diane Glancy is as close to poetry one can get when reading a memoir. In a lyrical prose style interjected with the author's own poetry, quotations of bible verses, and even wikipedia article entries, Glancy conveys the complexity of her life by documenting her nomadic travels across the country in recent years.

In many ways I feel like an outsider when reading Glancy's book, as there's very little experiential that I can relate to in her life. I'm not Native American, I don't remember the 1940's, I'm not Christian, I don't particularly enjoy poetry, and I have never lived in the South. I genuinely felt alienated when I started reading this book, as Glancy is writing richly from these experiences and absolutely does not stop to provide explanations. Besides which the prose style was, at least initially, difficult to parse. Yet as I kept reading I was drawn into her world, to feel as I imagine she felt. What skill, and she even tells us what she's doing as she's doing it:

“In my field of poetry, some of the fragments don't seem to fit together. In class we read poems that have unknowable parts, new poetry, non-representational, much like abstract art. To abstract is to place the finding of the meaning on the reader.” (p51)

I have no idea how you will feel while reading this book, but I recommend you do so. ( )

Summary: The traveling memoirs of a literature professor listening to the messages the land speaks and what within her answers these messages.

This is a book constantly on the move, as is its author. Diane Glancy is an emeritus literature and creative writing professor, still a visiting professor at various institutions across the country. She lives on the road, driving from place to place in an old Chevy with 180,000 miles on it. She believes the land has messages to which she listens as she drives. Her home is the road. She sleeps at rest stops, eats at roadside restaurants, and offers exquisite descriptions of what she sees.

She writes:

My creative scholarship is on the road by myself, sometimes within the shadow of other cars. When I am working on a project, I am following the trail of some historical character. The land has memory. It keeps a journal of what has passed upon it. It is in the elements–if I stand there long enough. There is something in the solitary that I find its shape and that I find its shape and connection to the past.

She is part Native American, raised in a fundamentalist Christian tradition where “everyone accepted Christ as their Savior.” As fashionable as it is in her circles to scorn Christianity and as problematic as it may be she states, “It has been foundational in my life–even its incomprehensible and off-setting parts. I believe in the Christ who was crucified.”

She chronicles her adventures with movers transporting her household from Kansas to California and her own parallel travels, who break and possibly abscond with some of her stuff, and yet she prays God’s mercy on men who brought fishing poles in their truck.

The book reads like the musings one has when driving alone on a long trip, watching a train in the distance, the slowing of trucks on a steep incline, the “shredding of self” that occurs as the miles pile up, the challenges of faith and the failures of her life, including a failed marriage. Will there be driving in the beyond? She thinks Jesus would have loved interstates (all this on two pages). Another chapter, “At Dawn, When You Drive Again,” consists of fragments of memory, mostly of childhood.

Her chapters on disenfranchisement are perhaps the most powerful. Once again, she holds terrible injustices and gospel truths in tension:

But I stayed. I have always stayed. I always will stay. I belong to Christ. I believe within the gospel is everlasting life. The missionaries came with soldiers to teach us this and to rid us of the desperate attacks of panic.

Movingly, she captures the tragedy of the Dakota Access Pipeline, once more, the imposition of American power over indigenous peoples during a visit to see what was taking place.

What made this travel memoir so powerful was this process of listening to the land, to its story and her own, often painful and yet held in tension with an unwavering belief, a hope that would not let her go any more than her love for the road. This is also an American story, in the grandeur of the landscape, the expanses we see from our network of highways, the spirituality that roots us, even as we wrestle with the pain of our own stories and the moral ambiguities of our national story. But will we listen? Will we stay?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program. ( )

Talk about a memoir that takes you on a journey! Through vignettes, stylistic changes, and a unique narrative voice, Diane Glancy relates experiences from her life in an incredibly immersive and meaningful way. The mechanism is engaging; the subject matter is intriguing. I found it hard to put this one down!
(I received a copy of this book from the publisher as part of the Early Reviewers program in exchange for an honest review.) ( )

“In a Mobius band there is no end of the road.”

This is an engaging book to read, but a difficult one to summarize. I found the structure of the content somewhat confusing. Certainly the main theme is travel. Literal travel, spiritual travel, historical travel. But there is also a desperate search for identity, and distinct feelings of longing and loss. There were limited connections to other people which heightened the sense of the author’s isolation. Was that self-imposed? I have more questions than answers. My practical self wants to try to understand everything, or overanalyze it but I think the best option for this book is just to let the author’s journey slowely like a road that stretches into the distant horizon. ( )