Five Plots

by Erica Trabold

Five Plots delves into notions of how we are shaped by the land every bit as much as we shape it. This book eschews easy ways of understanding and experiencing the world by investigating place as a malleable psychological and phenomenological force.

“The late poet and essayist Deborah Tall revolutionized the literature of place by changing our understanding of how potently we can be impacted by the conflagrations of landscape, family, and memory. Now, Erica Trabold kick-starts a new book series named for Deborah Tall with a debut that imaginatively probes its own part of the world through humor, history, speculation, and hurt. This is a pinprick of a book with a very generous heart.”
—John D’Agata, author of The Lifespan of a Fact and About a Mountain

“What a wonderful excavation of identity, time, and place and what holds us, what
keeps us, what won’t let us go. Erica Trabold’s Five Plots beautifully unearths the layers of history that make us what we are, doing so as only a poetic essayist can: incorporating memory, historical fact, failures, landscapes, hopes, and whatever grows or has grown. It was a delight to lose myself in her imagistic prose, her layers of dreamy sediment, her intersecting strata of family, memory, erosion, and death. Trabold’s landscape of childhood and Nebraska is haunting and bright, warm and hostile, captured in entrancing syntax and meditation. Five Plots signals a daringly honest, intelligent, and complicated voice in the world of essays.”
—Jenny Boully, author of The Body: An Essay

“Five Plots is a beautiful book. Under Trabold’s careful scrutiny the land, the body, a family, and their shared histories are laid bare, followed to the place where their roots intertwine, where their mystery refuses to yield. Examined with an eye equally tender and relentless, the starkest places ache with beauty in these pages."
—Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me

“With grace, ambition, and a charmed eye for detail, the five “plots” that comprise Erica Trabold’s stirring debut achieve a significant feat: instead of either pulling stories of the self from the landscape or depicting a landscape via the unique perspective of an observant self, this small gem of a book manages to accomplish both simultaneously.”
—Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir

108 pages, Paperback

Published November 6, 2018

Reviews

[Elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is easily one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. The writing picks you up effortlessly and gently pulls you into the landscape, desert, prairie, water, home. I’d recommend it to anyone who has ever searched for something and recognized the wildness within them.

[Emily Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five Plots is as imaginative and hopeful and heartbreaking as childhood tends to be, especially in the Midwest. Especially through a reflective space. Trabold does something magical with the lay of the land and the cartographic queries of all our minds and bodies. Her lyric style is intentional and subtle and smart and approachable, revealing the same qualities as the local genius of a place. This piece keeps you moving in the same way the author does: here and all over and nowhere and everywhere. 10/10 would recommend to a friend.

[Heather Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so delighted and awed and comforted by this book, by the precision with which Erica Trabold observes and recollects her surroundings and her experience--almost so that they can substitute for one another. She wraps herself in exploration and purposeful excavation as she writes. She is endlessly curious yet sure-footed in her arrival points. This book is for anyone who's from somewhere and has been shaped by it.

[Natasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved it! I have been inspired to appreciate every detail in life. I can't wait to read it again. ❤

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book all in one sitting, and I finished it feeling nostalgic for a place I've never been. I wanted to go back in time to the grass plains of Nebraska, to a time before the digging began to create the manmade lakes, and to a voyage across the sea so that I could understand, even just a bit more, the history that inspired this book, this land, and these stories.

Trabold does a great job combining a sense of realism, grounded firmly in details and specificity that brings you right into the moments she is describing, with the imaginative underpinnings of the moment, pulling you along with her on the journey to what might have been, what was, and what could be.

Excellent book -- if you're looking for a book that you can read to inspire your imagination while providing a sense of personal and beyond historical perspective, pick this one up. I am also somewhat new to the genre of creative nonfiction, and I really enjoyed this foray a bit further into the expanse that this type of literature provides.

[André Habet · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this only intending to read one essay in my initial reading. Then I read another, and another. Before long, it was a bit over two hours later and I'd just gone through it all. I'd heard Trabold read some of these pieces in different forms during our overlap at Oregon State, and encountering those and others on the page was a true delight. Tracks was definitely my favorite of the collection as it's reckoning with mortality and the Nebraskan wilderness hit me deep. Looking forward to more from Trabold as she continues explorations of land, the complicated relationship to it formed by settler-colonialism, and whatever the hell else she wants to do next.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elegant, subtle, and intelligent. Recently, I have been fascinated by the way place shapes identity, and the back-and-forth of how the land and the people that reside on it fundamentally alter each other, so I was delighted to find this book that not only wrestles with these questions, but does so in Nebraska, the place where I came of age but still struggle to claim outright (military child problems).

[Vera Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this! It was fun to learn more about Nebraska’s history, all while reading from such an innocent and relatable point of view. Very poetic, honest, and inspiring to make me wonder about my own family history.

[kc · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The company altered the landscape with a single downward motion repeated a hundred thousand times. They shifted the earth. Someone ordered a highway. Someone ordered a pool. Someone ordered a driveway, a sidewalk, four upright basement walls."

[Isla McKetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the way this deceptively simple book wound around itself to tell the stories of places and people in a holistic and intimate way.

[Alison]

Another author I met at nonfiction now. Another brilliant memoir. The bar is here high!