Vagabond Scribe (Leah’s Backstory)

In this literary experiment, the young Leah as a woman archives traces of her life. She begins the first stage of her retrospective in the mid-1980s, at the opening of Vagabond Scribe. The paper trails that she follows lead to real and imagined places she has visited as a child, a teenager, and a young woman. Her diaries and journals help, and so do her old letters, as well as her collection of books and memorabilia. Aware of blind spots and exclusions, she creates a collage of textual fragments, traces of where she has been. Readers glimpse a look behind the scenes at a memory bank in the making, a resource for ideas and inspiration as well as for stories to come. Vagabond Scribe can be read as a prequel to Arella’s Repertoire.