A mixed genre book of poetry, memoir, fiction, and haiku, Kintsugi 金継ぎ Walnut: 22 Years of Writing tells the story of the young adulthood of Maggie Hess. The book opens with a series of diary entries from 2001, when Maggie was traveling abroad in Costa Rica with her scientist sister, exploring the rainforest daily, and becoming a Quaker. 

This moody, nutty story cracks open to 2005, where Maggie and her roommate Lyric are cohabiting in Appalachia, Virginia, learning about the negative effects of Mountaintop Removal coal mining which has recently killed an infant on the same road, with a boulder crashing into a crib. But her commitment to protesting and protect mountains is short lived, or is it?

We find the next chapter, a work of fiction about a young heroine who is driving to Costa Rica around the time of the Korean war, and she picks up a traveling mime by the side of the road. Then, we find Maggie a few years later, an intern at a nonprofit retreat in North Carolina, with three interesting women, moon bathing deep in the unknown.  

Poems are braided into the work, and sometimes whole chapters are composed strictly of poetry. We find Maggie in Berea College, trying to explore the connections between ritual and routine, and taking a course in contemplative writing. The poems are telling their own story, which adds to the prose writing.  

A whole book of haiku is included about a road beside a stream and on the way to a giant waterfall, a place that is revisited weekly for decades. We get to “My Hojoki,” a memoir that summarizes the impermanent nature of Maggie’s own sanity. Then, there is yet another road trip fiction story, also about a young woman who picks up a hitchhiker.  

Some of the poems explore mental illness, while another section mourns the death of a yellow lab. Then, there is a fiction story that explores the community nature of an urban street.