Fresh, intimate, and radiantly meditative, Homing Instincts is the story of one woman's ocoming of ageo as a first-time parent on her family's rural Ohio farm After teaching English to recalcitrant teenagers on Reunion Island, picking grapes in France, and witnessing a revolution in Mexico, Sarah Menkedick, at thirty-one, embarks on what might become her most challenging adventure yet- she moves into a tiny nineteenth-century cabin on her family's farm, and prepares to become a mother. She never expected to want this kind of settled life, and yet she finds a new peace and inspiration in the surrounding natural world as she and her husband, Jorge, prepare for the exciting unknown. Menkedick juxtaposes the progress of her pregnancy and the larger questions it inspires with recollections of her family history; being raised by a single and unapologetically hippie father; her paternal grandmother, Millie, whose Midwestern German fortitude informed the character of the next two generations; and her husband Jorge's loving but difficult childhood in Oaxaca, Mexico. All together, it becomes a luminous portrait of the time just before and after new motherhood.

Author Biography

SARAH MENKEDICK is a writer, editor, mother, and traveler. Fluent in French and Spanish, she has lived and worked in Mexico, France, China, and Japan, and traveled across five continents. She holds a B.A. in history and the history of science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.F.A in nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh, where she taught nonfiction writing. She is a 2015-2016 Fulbright fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico. She is the founder of Vela, an online magazine of nonfiction writing by women.