Aftercomers Cannot Guess: A Memoir of Places

By Ann Evans Berthoff

"This is a memoir of places lived in and loved, stayed at length in, visited briefly, places dreamed about," writes Ann Evans Berthoff (1924-2022) in the Preface to Aftercomers Cannot Guess . "The places here remembered have, mostly, disappeared.... 'After-comers cannot guess the beauty been,' [she quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins] nor can they--most of them--guess, picture, imagine the kind of places there were in the U.S. before the Interstate Highway System, or any place in the world before air travel." Ann Berthoff is best known as a teacher and as the author of books on language, reading, writing, and teaching writing as a way to learn. She taught composition--"experimental writing"--at Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Swarthmore, and for 18 years at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She was a regular lecturer at the Bread Loaf School of English, and was Randolph Distinguished Visiting Professor at Vassar College in 1989-90. She wrote Aftercomers in the 2000s, circulated a draft to friends at the end of that decade, and continued to expand and revise the memoir until shortly before her passing in November 2022, in her 99th year. Part I concerns her own and others' "homeplaces," in Alabama and Iowa, in cities and towns elsewhere, and on farms. Part II, "Poetics of Travel," ranges from bicycling in post-war Europe, to half a century of visits to Sicily, Ireland, Yugoslavia, and the Isle of Canna in the Hebrides. "Of course," Berthoff cautioned, "the very aim, not just the terminology, of reclaiming the past and its meanings, trying to remember, trying to see anew, is hazardous because of the demon of nostalgia, ... the sentimentality entailed in the attempt to recall one's earlier selves and the places where they were realized." Nonetheless, "In these sketches and stories I have tried to suggest how things were, not only for me but for characters in their landscapes, those for whom these places were home. They are all gone, like those places, and we shall not see their like again."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CVQFFQPX
• ISBN13: 9798877996656
• Release Date: February 2024
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 249 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.6" x 6.0"