Brick by Brick

There are stories that arrive as facts and stories that arrive as weather.

The latter move differently. They drift through families in fragments attach themselves to gestures, settle into houses, emerge unexpectedly in the middle of unrelated conversations.

For years, I believed research meant moving toward certainty. Toward verification. Toward the stable ground of documented truth. But the deeper I moved into the work that would eventually become WARD, the more I began to understand research as something stranger--an act of listening across time. To people, yes. But also to landscapes. To architecture. To the strange persistence of details and a felt sense of what endures across centuries. 

One of these details involved bricks. 

"It Started with Family Lore" >> CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN

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My makeshift office in the Girod Suite at the lovely Blue Heron Bed and Breakfast in Mandeville, Louisiana.

Place-based research, for me, involved getting lost. Following Patty Lather's feminist methodology, I learned to approach uncertainty not as failure but as invitation--a surrender of authority that made room for haunting, intuition, vulnerability. Forms of knowing that resist mastery.

Wandering, then, became method. Attunement revealed archive. Through rhetorical listening extended beyond the human, and even the living, the landscape began to speak in fragments, rhythms, absence, and repetition.

​In this space, the gothic emerged not merely as genre but as methodology: a way of listening through Kristeva's chora to what lingered before language, beneath history, beyond the visible world.

"Tracing Clues to St. Gertrude" >> CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN

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A visual representation of the relational mapping of convents within a radius of the home Hester built.

The deeper I moved into the research, the more the boundaries between investigation and encounter began to dissolve.

Patterns emerged slowly across distance, memory, architecture, and story, linking places that initially seemed too distant, unrelated.

I learned to follow what lingered rather than forcing resolution too quickly. Again and again, meaning arrived obliquely. Through fragments, detours, moments that felt less discovered than uncovered. 

                                    "Finding a Secret Archive" >> CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN

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Research rarely arrives in straight lines. More often, it begins with something unresolved: a contradiction, a repeated image, a place that lingers longer than it should. 

The work is not simply locating information, but learning how to remain attentive long enough for patterns to emerge. Sometimes the story changes. Sometimes you do. But nearly always, the details that matter most are the ones that refuse disappearance. 

Perhaps that is where all narrative begins. 
Not with certainty, but with the moment something insists: 
​Write this down. 

​The story did not end there. 
Research changes once it enters narrative. 
Details shift. Time bends. Atmosphere gathers around fact. 
What remains is not transcription, but invocation. 

The following excerpt from WARD emerged
directly from this investigation
into Hester's house, the chapel grounds,
and the story carried forward,
brick by brick,
​ across generations.



CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN TO AN EXCERPT FORM THE BOOK 

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