Bob Campana set out to write for his children and grandchildren, to get the details down before they faded.
We met for two hours every Tuesday morning for six months. The conversations wandered: steerage out of Italy, a royal fishing hole in Nepal, a partnership from hell, a backyard bonfire gone rogue. I never knew where a morning was headed, and that is exactly where the good material hides.
By spring it was clear we were holding more than a family memoir. One thread ran through every story: how he handled risk, how he kept reinventing himself, how he stayed close to people. That thread turned a private keepsake into a book written for anyone starting something of their own. Bob’s voice never changed. My job was to keep it on the page.
What it shows is a form. Not a memoir with photographs added, but a book in which the prose, the photographs, the documents and the white space are all carrying the story at once. A passport page does work no paragraph can do. A caption can tell you how to look at a photograph, and turn an ordinary snapshot into evidence.
Cathie was eighty-eight when she came to me. She wanted her grandchildren, and one day their children, to understand the life she and Bill had built, and she mentioned, nearly in passing, a cardboard box of poems she had been writing for more than a decade and never shown to anyone.
The poems turned out to be the book. She had written them as things happened: one month when too much happened to her friends, a pandemic spring, three tea kettles. So they are not a memoir looking back at a life. They are a record kept while it was going on.
We wove them together with photographs and family documents into three hundred pages.
A founder who built companies and sold them and moved on, again and again, and arrived in his seventies wanting to know what he had been looking for the whole time. The businesses are in the book; they are not what the book is about. We are still writing, and still arguing about the title, which is usually a sign a book is alive.
A thousand acres in Iowa, four generations, and a hundred and fifty-seven years of one family’s work on the same ground. When the last owner died the land passed to people who could not keep it, and it was sold. The farm is gone; the book is what the family has instead.