Pass-Through Place - by Jenna Brack (Paperback)

About the Book

Unfolding as a coming-of-age memoir, 20 essays reveal Kansas as a formative landscape of resilience and hope.

Book Synopsis

Ride along with Jenna Brack as she explores the vast and varied Kansas landscape, a place some consider flat and uninteresting. In this collection of personal essays that unfold as a coming-of-age memoir, Brack reveals how the land and people of Kansas have been catalysts for growth, healing, and identity. As Brack passes through wheatfields, historic ice storms, or the sprawling Flint Hills, she also travels through her own inner landscape of longing and loss. Together, these essays spotlight Kansas as much more than a pass-through place, and instead as a formative place of resilience and hope. Brack's storytelling invites us to consider how our own pass-through places are infused with meaning-even how they might carry us home.

Review Quotes

"Jenna Brack's Pass-Through Place is an essay collection that is best read slowly. Her light touch with words and her clean writing mirrors the unassuming plains and the openness of sky. But like the subtle beauty of Kansas, there's a depth to this work that settles in with the reader long after the back cover is closed."

-Cheryl Unruh, author of Gravedigger's Daughter: Vignettes from a Small Kansas Town

"Reading Jenna Brack's Pass-Through Place left me feeling like I'd just taken a long drive with the windows down on a warm summer evening. Brack weaves stories of family, daily life, and personal loss with details about the varied landscape and weather of her home state of Kansas, a place known for its big sky and amber waves of grain. As I criss-crossed the state with Brack through this collection of poignant personal essays, I felt not only the haunting of her growing up places, but a reminiscence that pointed me back to my own. The book is called Pass-Through Place, but it's really an invitation to stop and linger a while, both in Brack's memories, reflections, and observations, as well as our own."

-Charity Singleton Craig, author of The Art of the Essay

"Woven from her love of place and moments in her lifetime-both unassuming and notable-writer Jenna Brack invites us to pay tender attention to our life at hand, and to the softly worn discovery that 'a place like Kansas rewards the quiet search.' Like a friend sitting with us at our kitchen table, Jenna's writing lovingly invites us to see wherever we are with great care. A heartbreaking, sentient, deeply moving collection of essays."

-Amy Messenger, songwriter and poet