WAYFINDING: A MEMOIR - Renee M. Gilmore

Renee M. Gilmore

On Writing
Wayfinding: A Memoir

I didn't set out to write a memoir. In 2022, I took a six-week sabbatical to write a poetry chapbook about my father. I had a few poems already written, some that I started more than a decade earlier in graduate school, and I had ideas about how I wanted to shape the chapbook. I even had a title. I figured I could write forty-eight to sixty pages, or at least get a good start.
I got on a plane, flew to New Mexico, and holed up in a hotel for three weeks. I spent time driving around Albuquerque, remembering and dredging up things that happened there, during my college years and shortly after. I was not prepared for how visceral some of those memories were. At points, I felt physically sick. By the end of the third week, I had written more than eighty pages, and I realized this was not a chapbook. It was not even poetry. I found the poetic structure to be too confining for the memories and emotions I was conjuring up. This was also not going to just be about my father.
I grew up in a car family: road-trippers, mechanics, and racers, and my whole life, I have been in love with the open road. I’ve traveled across the country and to all seven continents. I always thought I was driving toward something, but I finally realized I was driving away. From a very traumatic childhood and young adulthood filled with sexual abuse, betrayals, losses, and domestic violence. I was finally forced me to confront what happened to me, and while it was messy and not linear, I began to map out a new life journey that has brought me safety, connection, love, and joy.
Told in a series of car trips, expeditions, and observations from the road, Wayfinding: A Memoir puts you in the front seat. From a six-year-old cheerfully sweeping the garage floor for the local Hell's Angels to a harrowing midnight abduction in India, each story serves as a mile marker on my road to self-discovery. I navigate life fueled by shaky optimism, seeking the place that feels most like home, and find the healing powers of Waffle House and the Monaco Grand Prix along the way.