SEARCHING FOR HERE

Educator Couch recounts living through a year of tumultuous national events between 2019 and 2020.

“Now, in my sixties, I find myself searching once again for a place I love enough to call home,” the author writes in the book’s introduction, adding, “This compulsion toward change seems ridiculous, at my age.” Originally written as personal journal entries, the book is bookended by recollections of two long, dark nights of two winter solstices: December 21, 2019, and December 21, 2020. Many of the chronological diary entries center on vignettes in which the author describes, for instance, her experiences growing up in the Midwest or her fondness for dogs. She surveys her professional life as an adjunct English instructor with a teaching load divided between three schools (an increasingly common feature of academia), and tells how she navigated the logistical difficulties of different start dates and procedures. The book’s timeframe also provides her a venue for exploring some dark days in the nation’s history, as she offers her thoughts about the first impeachment hearings of President Donald Trump, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter protests. In June 2020, for example, the author, a white Midwesterner, reflects on the murder of George Floyd, processing her shock at the brutality of the incident. Couch is the author of multiple scholarly works on Midwestern life and culture, and her thoughtful writing style feels almost novelistic at times, often reflecting on the nature of time and memory itself. Literary and historic references abound, from the book’s dedication to the Greek goddess of memory to its discussions of an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monk, Venerable Bede. This erudite reflection on a fateful year maintains a refreshing humility that belies its subtle sophistication, as the author describes her perspective simply as that of “a middle-aged woman living in a small rural town in the middle of the county.”

A nuanced and occasionally poignant collection of journal entries from a pivotal moment in history.