Volume One · Memoir
The
Sasquatch's
Roar
Field Notes from the Wilderness of Being Human
In Agent Review
But you can't spend a whole life running from
a roar. At some point, the wildness catches up
with you. Not to kill you. To teach you.
From Chapter 5 · The Blue Beast
The Pitch
A memoir about what happens
when the thing you ran from
catches up.
In 1974, two boys from Saluda met something in the woods that wasn't supposed to exist. They ran. One of them, Geno Church, would spend the next fifty years pretending he hadn't heard what he heard.
In August of 2024, paralyzed in a hospital bed from an autoimmune disease the doctors called rare, he heard it again. Same wool-blanket silence. Same low roar. Only this time, the thing in the woods sat down at the campfire.
The book is the story of those fifty years, and of what happens
when the thing you ran from catches up and asks you to sit a spell.
It's a memoir about terror and fatherhood, paralysis and recovery, and the strange grace of being undone in your sixties. About the encounters that name us before we know we're being named. About what it means to stop explaining the woods and start trusting them.
It is also, in its own quiet way, a field guide. Each chapter carries small invitations to listen to your own woods. Not as a workshop or a self-help device. As marginalia a reader scribbles into a book they're not finished with.
Why This Book
I never wanted to write a memoir.
I'd spent thirty years helping other people find their words. Communities, organizations, brands trying to remember what they actually believed. I was good at it. I didn't think I had a story of my own.
The August 2024 morning when my legs stopped working changed that. Not because the illness gave me a story. Because the silence after the fall finally let me hear the one I'd been carrying since I was fourteen.
This is the book I had to write because I couldn't keep running from it. It exists because I finally stopped pretending I hadn't heard what I heard.
For Agents & Editors
The shape of the manuscript at a glance.
Title
The Sasquatch's Roar: Field Notes from the Wilderness of Being Human
Genre
Memoir / Narrative Nonfiction · with hybrid field-notes architecture
Word Count
63,000
Comparable Titles
The Sasquatch's Roar · memoir, currently with agents
Saluda Awakens · Southern Gothic fiction, querying
Vinum Immortale · in editorial revision
WolfGator · in planning & drafting
Geno Church · Co-author of Brains on Fire (Wiley, 2008) and
The Passion Conversation (Wiley, 2013) · Full bio →
geno@genochurch.com
Author
Reach
Dispatches from the Wilderness.
Stay Close to the Fire
Occasional letters from the wilderness while the book finds its way
to readers. Notes on the work. Field reports. The kind of thing you'd
want to receive on the morning of a hard week.