Home Is the Road: Wandering the Land, Shaping the Spirit

by Diane Glancy

"[Glancy's] long-distance drives take on the monastic qualities of a spiritual pilgrimage rather than serving merely as a means to a destination." --The New York Times Book Review The land carries voices. The land remembers what happened upon it. In traveling the land, I become familiar with more than myself. Give me the journey of the road; it is my journey home. From the award-winning Native American literary writer Diane Glancy comes a book about travel, belonging, and home. Travel is not merely a means to bring us from one location to another. "My sense of place is in the moving," Glancy writes. For her the road is home--its own satisfying destination. But the road also makes demands on asking us to be willing to explore the incomprehensible parts of the landscapes we inhabit and pass through--as well as to, ultimately, let them blur as they go by. This, Glancy says, is home. Glancy teases out the lessons of the road that are never easy to define, grappling with her childhood's puzzle pieces of her Cherokee heritage and a fraught but still compelling vision of Christianity. As she clocks an inordinate amount of driving, as she experiments with literary forms, she looks to what the land has held for centuries, before the roads were ever there. This, ultimately, is a book about land, tradition, religion, questions and the puzzle pieces none of us can put together quite right. It's a book about peripheral vision, conflicting narratives, and a longing for travel.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, Memoir

214 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2022

About the author

(Helen) Diane Glancy is a Cherokee poet, author and playwright.

Glancy was born in 1941 in Kansas City, Missouri. She received her Bachelor of Arts (English literature) from the University of Missouri in 1964, then later continued her education at the University of Central Oklahoma, earning her a Masters degree in English in 1983. In 1988, she received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa.

Glancy is an English professor and began teaching in 1989 at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, teaching Native American literature and creative writing courses. Glancy's literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 I enjoyed this wander on the roads, it just left me longing for a little bit more direction and destination. Still. There were several insightful moments, and loved the familiarity, as I have made many of the same journeys.

[Larissia Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

thought-provoking, disjointed. Thank you for the ride and journey.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Traveling by myself for a long distance makes a vacuum that draws the voices of the land into it. I drive until there is a vortex, and I am in a different realm. A long journey is a small, black hole in which the land, the past, the possibilities of imagination are stuck.

Travel is a place of belonging. And I have a sense of belonging to words that drive down row and row in books. Separation is my inheritance. A wayfarer. A traveler by myself. Even to my very bones, if bones could be seen as an interstate highway system.

I was not in love with this despite the subject material and my admiration of her as a novelist and poet. There were gems though, and I think I too have a similar calling to the road, to nomadism, even as I can do both, stay and go. In another book, she has some lovely stories of the children she taught poetry to, and the way it landed in different towns, and this was more of her personal journal, perhaps, and her wrestling with identity and belonging.

If I am quiet and traveling by myself, and have asked to hear what is there to hear, the road offers voices—and thoughts of what should be written. This is what I know. I was created. I suffered loss. I was restored. I keep traveling both back and forward.

In that mix, or mux, or flux of language, where phrases run together, and meaning is buried, is the explanation of what I feel. Something other calls me to itself.

I have aloneness. Though at times I feel the traveling-beings, the helpers, who like to travel around me and with me, confident of their presence. Recently, someone asked if I minded driving after dark on my long trips. I said without hesitation that helpers are there on the road at night. There’s an endurance or resilience in the spirit world—when endurance is necessary. There’s a presence that comes, even if it is only an attitude from within. I am not a scholar to explain it. I am not a full-blood anything, but a mixed-blood in a car, heading away and heading to and trying to find the lost.

Maybe our memory is found in the land. I remember because the land remembers. This stone will be a witness to us, for it has heard the words of the Lord he spoke to us. —Joshua 24:27 This is what I know. This is something the land itself has said: They shall dwell safely in the wilderness, and sleep in the woods. —Ezekiel 34:25

Does God pluck those he chooses from the doomed and let the others perish? I have these questions that stretch throughout my interior landscape, a travelogue of inquiries. An album of discontent. Protestant Christianity. It has been foundational in my life—even its incomprehensible and off-setting parts. I believe in the Christ who was crucified.

Kansas is named after an Indian tribe. The name means people of the wind, though I remember hearing it also meant blue smoke from Indian campfires on the prairie. In travel, I become the moving place that distance is. Driving the land has every possible history encamped in rock and stone and soil,

Have I ever known who I am—except in the placement of thought in travel? Travel is the establishment of a moving place, allowing a space between storms and thunder.

The metaphor for travel is first elk or caribou. Then bird or whale. A disembodiment from earth. Stars always were available at night for destination. There was elsewhere in momentum. The way an airplane or a stamp can travel.

Sometimes, in the distance, I saw blowing sand, as if the southwest was picking up to move away. Sometimes, the dust swept across the road in strings like the snow I remembered streaming across the highways in Minnesota when I lived there. Ford Dry Lake Road. Sutro Ditch. Rollie Ditch. Ghost Ditch. Quartz Ditch. Texas Wash. Bula Ditch. Red Cloud Road. Hayfield Road, where there is neither hay nor field. I drove through the desert, past the slow-moving traffic of the mountains. They seemed to roll sometimes like waves on a great, silent sea.

No long car trips is complete without playlists, of course, and I have many. I think these songs speak of what I have found on the road, and how I might start my own book about the road.

Miles from My Home by the Cowboy Junkies

No one in sight for fifty miles
Sleeping fields sigh as I glide across their spines.
If I can just reach the crest of that hill
This whole day will tumble, out the night will spill.
The sky as still as a spinning top
Shooting stars drop like burning words from above
If I could just connect all these dots
The truth would tumble like a Cynic vexed by love.
And yet people keep saying
I'm miles from my home,
Miles from my home.
I met you again in my sleep last night,
These are days of slow boats and false starts.
Hearts remain under lock and key,
You will be the one to set them both free.
And yet people will tell you
You're miles from your home,
Miles from your home.
But that's where I want to be.
Out there searching,
Out here fumbling,
Out here waiting
For you and you for me.
The moon hangs like a question mark,
Pale as milk, bold as promise.
When will you share these sights with us?
When will we hold you in our arms?
And people will tell them
We're miles from our home,
Miles from our home.

Car Outside by Jimmy LaFave
You know I'll never understand it, babe
Wanderlust in my soul
And though I want to be with you
Hey, I don't really know
Cause I'm looking out your window, girl
And I'm drifting with the wind
Moving on is my middle name
Hey, here I go again
There's a car outside
And there's a road
There's a time to stay
And a time to rock and roll
You've been a real good friend
But I'm on my way
If I don't see you real soon
I'll see you down the road someday
I hear the highway calling me
Time and time again
Clearer than the master's voice
Just like a next of kin
I tried to settle down one time
It was in my younger days
But I fell into a ramblin song
And it carried me away
Well there's a car outside

Goin’ By Feel by Ray Bonneville

Young bird flew on new wings
Knew what to do instinctively
Didn't ask how wonder why
Just went out into the sky
Goin' by feel
Goin' by feel
Little river starts out slow
Faster and bigger as she goes
Every curve shallow and deep
Goin' home to the sea
Goin' by feel
Goin' by feel
I can't say why but some days
I close my eyes and see your face
I hear your words in my ear
Firefly comin' this way
Flickering light as if to say
Time ain't but this long
Here tonight tomorrow gone
I can't say why but someday
I close my eyes and see your face
I hear your words in my ear
Nothing's for sure
Go by feel
Here it comes from behind the cloud
The big old sun shining down
Here it comes without a sound
Can you feel it now
Goin' by feel

Others: Bliss Like This by Ani Difranco, Wandering Star by Portishead, Rider of Days by Patty Griffin, Return of the Grievous Angel by Whiskeytown, Roads and Philospher’s Stone by Van Morrison, Pilgrim by Steve Earle, Wanderin’ Heart by The Haunted Windchimes, Windows are Rolled Down by Amos Lee, Many the Miles by Sara Bareilles, Highway and the Moon by Jeffrey Foucault, Everywhere I Go by Lissie, Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

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?

____________________

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

[Jim Razinha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, one message I take from this, probably unintended by the author, is that we should embrace nonlinear randomness. And I do! It's the way I think! Although, I apparently have a hard time reading it.

I received a review copy of this in December from the publisher Broadleaf Books through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program (not early in this case, as it was published in June of 2022, but grateful nonetheless.) I like to drive. The title and subtitle resonated, and though I only do long hauls infrequently now, I can relate to being alone in one's head (even if one's wife is next to him) as the miles roll by. I knew nothing of Ms. Glancy before receiving this. I know a little now. I didn't know what to expect, so if this isn't what I was expecting, does that make sense? I always wondered what comes after "postmodern". Post-postmodern? She said to her students studying contemporary poetry, "You don't have to like it, but you have to know it's there." She has a section that was adapted from an earlier essay inspired by Gerald Vizenor. Look him up, and I learn the term "sur-writer". Too close to the source, I didn't connect my own notes "this is surreal" with "sur" until later. I read the original essay and found it more powerful and impactful than some of the changes she made for the version included here. (I like to follow references. I encourage anyone reading this to follow that one.)

She listens to audio books and the New Testament. I listen to Great Courses (and my own narratives - yes, plural.) Her religion plays a huge part in her life, and she peppers her prose heavily with references and verse. It actually got a little annoying, but her book, her life, her choice, right? I'm just a reader.

And as the reader, this took me longer to read than it probably would have if written in a different style (that I was in a near two month longer reading/writing funk contributed). The prose was unsettling, but I eventually got her rhythm. Won't make me change my opinion of David Foster Wallace's work (though he's been characterized as moving beyond postmodern fiction, this is a different direction), and it will be a while before I am ready for another.
I'm a marginalia-ist (Coleridge coined the word, I add the suffix) and I wrote a lot in these margins. So, I have to distill. I'll just share curated phrases that got my attention:

[driving through] ... state after fracked state. [and...] In Texas, I've heard the drilling. It is a violent rape of the land. How else is there to say it?

The large trucks on the highway are herds of migrating animals.

My past is like clothes that don't fit. My future is having something to give up for someone else.

You hear rocks speak their own language. In your cruelty you do not let them speak their words.

{There are more. Many more. Including some of the epigraphs. Too many.}

[Gail Jurczyk · Rating 1 out of 5]

(Curiosity: Galancy’s fondnesss for the word “Similitude")

Towards the end of the book, Glancy remembers a student staging a reading that consisted of her pulling papers randomly from a cardboard box and reading what she had written on that fragment. She had been a foundling discovered in a cardboard box, adopted with no record of her birth parents. And that box “held” her memories written on fragments of paper, which she read as she randomly drew them out..

I interpreted Glancy’s telling of the student’s memoir method— the telling is unusual in this book for not being tethered to an identified interstate or back-road— as Glancy’s expulcation for the lack of structure in her own book. “Home is the Road…” has no chronology, progressive revelation, or any connective tissue between the memory fragments. Each is loosely anchored to a not-chronologically-traveled interstate or house/apartment/Walmart parking lot/Dakota plain where they happened.

If fans of “Ulysses” pilgrimage to Dublin to gain the full, alluded-to experience, maybe it’s necessary to drive on interstates between the Dakotas, Kansas, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California in a high-mileage vehicle, your possessions entrusted to an inexperienced, directionally-challenged, freelance team of two random guys in an old truck. Her possessions being predictably lost and scattered with an unknown impact or effect on her or the moving guys is a metaphor for how I experienced this book: stuff disjointedly happens and a pervasive numbness ensues.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.)

[Kim]

I tried to like it but I did not. It was rambly and empty. It so desperately wanted to be profound but it was simply lacking. As she says, sometimes you go a long ways and come to nothing. That was the experience of reading this book.

[Benjamin Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book, full of insight. It is lyrical and moving: a meditation on home, movement, and moving into the years beyond midlife. With wisdom and humility, Glancy reflects on writing, native identity, history, culture, and family. This is a book to read slowly and savor.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

the book wasn't what i was expecting. I found a lot of it to be just rambling and only understood what was trying to be told in a few parts.