After Genevieve: The Pathway Home

The Ardent Writer Press welcomes debut author and collegiate volleyball coach, Rachel Menin, with her memoir, After Genevieve: The Pathway Home.. 

FROM THE BOOK COVER

Young Lainey Traynor‘s mother, Genevieve, has died. Soon, she also loses her father, Jeremiah, after he abandons her, unable to cope with the tragedy. Lainey is sent to live with her loving grandparents, Jude and Tessie Weston, on a tobacco farm in Virginia. However, when Jude is hospitalized, the family realizes he is suffering from serious, life-threatening dementia. Tessie takes on the responsibility of caring for Jude, but that means that Lainey must reconnect with her father whom she has come to despise.

After Genevieve is about this difficult reconnection, which challenges not only Lainey, but everyone close to her. Ultimately Lainey and her father must both come to understand the importance of family and how forgiveness is their pathway to stability, happiness and love.

FROM RACHEL

I always felt like a writer growing up, but my inner critic was so loud I could never get any traction due to the fact that everything I wrote outside of the classroom, I threw away. In a round about way, my novel After Genevieve: The Pathway Home came out of my desire to be a better teacher which took me to graduate school at Wilkes Univeristy to get my MFA in creative writing. The timing of the initial wriitng turned out to be therapeutic as my own father was battling his Lewy Body Dementia, and I was able to incorporate my emotions and experiences into the novel. It took ten years for this book to come to fruition, so if there are any writers out there discouraged — keep going because once I stopped sabatoging myself, I was amazed that I could finally call myself a real writer. It was worth fighting through

The most fun I had in this whole process was doing some research in person. I dragged my friend Penny to some tobacco farms to pilch a leaf or two, and I spent a lovely weekend in Baltimore at Rebecca’s Bed and Breakfast exploring the city to find the right neighborhood for Jeremiah and Lainey. I also enjoyed all the workshopping I was able to do with my univeristy cohorts during the writing. We had a special group of people who continue to celebrate and support each other which these days seems kind of rare.

While not teaching at this stage of my life, I am getting to coach a great bunch of ladies which also affords me more time to get some more writing finished on my second novel. It turns out it’s a lot harder to crank the words out when you don’t have professors hounding you for your pages and edits. I miss that.

You can find me waxing slighlty eloquently on my blog and website at https://www.rachelmenin.com/ .