Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

by Andrew Forsthoefel

Overview

A memoir of one young man’s coming of age on a journey across America—told through the stories of the people of all ages, races, and inclinations he meets along the way.

Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us.

At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel headed out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Whitman and Rilke, and a sign that read "Walking to Listen." He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn’t know how. So he decided to take a cross-country quest for guidance, one where everyone he met would be his guide.

In the year that followed, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt. But he also encountered incredible kindness from strangers. Thousands shared their stories with him, sometimes confiding their prejudices, too. Often he didn’t know how to respond. How to find unity in diversity? How to stay connected, even as fear works to tear us apart? He listened for answers to these questions, and to the existential questions every human must face, and began to find that the answer might be in listening itself.

Ultimately, it’s the stories of others living all along the roads of America that carry this journey and sing out in a hopeful, heartfelt book about how a life is made, and how our nation defines itself on the most human level.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632867001
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	03/07/2017
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	1,023,757
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Andrew Forsthoefel is a writer, radio producer, and public speaker. Currently based in Northampton, Massachusetts, he facilitates workshops on walking and listening as practices in personal transformation, interconnection, and conflict resolution.

Editorial Reviews

08/08/2016
In 2011, at 23, after his Watson fellowship proposal to study the ways indigenous communities “guided their young people into adulthood” was rejected, and after he lost his job on a fishing boat, Forsthoefel packed his bags, brought books by Whitman and Rilke, and walked down the train tracks near his mother’s Philadelphia home. Then, he kept walking, all the way to the Pacific. In this moving and deeply introspective memoir, Forsthoefel writes about the uncertainties, melodramas, ambiguities, and loneliness of youth while describing his trip, reaching out to strangers as he walks south toward Selma, and then west across Navajo lands, Death Valley, and the Sierras. Along the way, he meets widowers, waitresses, ranchers, veterans, reverends, mystics, glass blowers, delusional walkers, firefighters, Navajo drummers, artists, new fathers, and families who take him into their homes, sharing their rich and varied perspectives—and advice on living. Each conversation offers a glimpse into the vast range of American life. Forsthoefel’s walk becomes a meditation on vulnerability, trust, and the tragedy of suburban and rural alienation. His radical openness to the variety of American experience includes unflinching encounters with lingering racism in Alabama, for instance. Forsthoefel’s conversation with America is fascinating, terrifying, mundane, and at times heartbreaking, but ultimately transformative and wise. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/15/2017
Unsure of what to do after graduating from college, Forsthoefel decided to walk across America, from Pennsylvania to the Pacific coast, and listen to the fascinating stories of ordinary people. Forsthoefel includes chunks of many of these tales verbatim. But what is even more fascinating, and unexpected, is the journey he goes through himself. Guided by Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet—both of which he quotes from copiously—he discovers what he can endure, what he is capable of, and finds his place in the world. For the author, what started out as an attempt to understand our connections to other people ends in a greater understanding of a connection with himself. VERDICT A remarkable book that calls to mind William Least-Heat Moon's Blue Highways. (Memoir, 1/13/17; ow.ly/D1mr308cbNW)—DS

Library Journal

10/01/2017
At 23, with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, Forsthoefel was uncertain about his future. To find some answers, he decided to walk from his suburban home in Pennsylvania to the California coastline. Taking minimal possessions (including a tent and some Snickers bars) and wearing a sign reading "Walking To Listen," Forsthoefel sought to clarify his own sense of self through the act of walking. By listening to others, he hoped to discover what it means to come of age. Featured throughout this lyrical adventure memoir are transcripts of conversations between the author and those he met on the road. Passages from his favorite writers (Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Kahlil Gibran) enhance the text. Each state Forsthoefel traversed receives some time in the descriptive spotlight. He considers weighty issues, such as race, privilege, religion, and family, and offers a fresh spin on familiar themes as he ponders how to approach the world and all its beauty and pain and how to listen to others. VERDICT This title will appeal to thoughtful teens and may serve as a tie-in to history, literature, and philosophy discussions.—Tara Kehoe, formerly at the New Jersey State Library Talking Book and Braille Center, Trenton

School Library Journal

2017-01-23
A college graduate's 11-month walking tour of America.Following graduation from Middlebury College, 23-year-old Forsthoefel hatched a plan to leave his mother's home in suburban Philadelphia and walk until he spent all his money or hit the Pacific Ocean, whichever came first. Guided by his literary heroes Rainer Maria Rilke, Khalil Gibran, and Walt Whitman (whose democratic spirit is a major influence here), Forsthoefel began traveling west with the bare minimum for shelter, a sign reading "Walking to Listen," and the vague idea that his trip would be "like a graduate program in the human experience." For the author, the impetus to walk was indefinable but urgent: "I woke up the next morning anxious to get walking again, toward what, I didn't quite know." Along the way, Forsthoefel confronted the "others" of society, and he remarks on race, class, and privilege. He also explains that while a student at Middlebury, he researched the concept of "coming of age" and how other cultures prepare their young to become adults. It's not hard to see how this concept informs Forsthoefel's trek, which was his own attempt to define his adulthood in the post-collegiate existentialist void experienced by so many millennials. However, the author's sincerity and earnestness are tempered by his urge to "learn something" from his encounters. He refers to the people he met as his "teachers," and he was consciously aware of his use of their experiences for his gain. (This also cost Forsthoefel his job on a fishing boat prior to his cross-country journey, when he revealed to the captain that he'd begun a blog about the experience.) The author recorded his conversations for future logging and transcribing, all a sign of his intention to use his trip for some other end, not merely the empathic experience of meeting citizens. However, Forsthoefel offers moments of genuine kinship and transcendence that buoy the narrative and make the adventure an uplifting, somewhat labored exercise in outreach. Millennial ennui turns into a search for meaning in an intriguing portrait of America.

Kirkus Reviews

"A remarkable book that calls to mind William Least-­Heat Moon's Blue Highways." —Library Journal Starred Review

From the Publisher

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