An Innkeeper’s Journal

Teacher, journalist, editor, inn- keeper: it has been quite a journey. The innkeeper part was Pam’s idea (that’s Pam on the left during one of our hikes in Goshen Pass): the finding of a bolt hole to escape our corporate jobs.

It was, I admit, a great idea and buying the Hummingbird Inn in Goshen, Virginia, turned out to be an adventure. It was not, however, quite the adventure we thought it would be. And therein lay the seeds of the book.

It started with our journal entries, little stories Pam and I began to record as the odd, unexpected experiences enlivened our days - eccentric guests, little annoyances we needed to get off our chests, the truly wonderful people we didn’t want to forget, the bats that came down the chimney, culinary disasters in the kitchen - it all seemed worth writing down. And so we began, with intermittent faithfulness, to record our journey into innkeeping. 

We didn’t write in it every day. But (and this is from the book) “we sit down to it whenever we feel moved by an experience, which causes us to write more about the extraordinary than the commonplace. Yet we chronicle pedestrian matters as well: how we feel about cleaning rooms; our ambivalence about doing dinners at the inn; and our anxieties over the inn’s finances.”

Over time our history of innkeeping grew, and over time it suggested we had a book in the making. Not that the book is the journal or the journal the book - much rewriting and reshaping needed to be done - but to give our stories coherence, to make it into an honest account of innkeeping, became a project that soon evolved into a passion.

Notes turned out to be fun to write. As it grew, the book became, at different stages, autobiographical, anecdotal, confessional, satirical, cathartic. And, as with any writing that is based on experience (Is there any other?) it was illuminating. Writing of our journey has helped us to understand where we have been and where we are going. The book has given us balance and perspective, bringing us to a realization we’d only partially grasped before, that our encounter with the occupation of innkeeping was an adventure we wouldn’t want to have missed. 

Notes from an Innkeeper’s Journal is self-published through Back Channel Press in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where publishers John and Nancy Grossman, themselves former innkeepers, provided indispensible help, advice, and guidance. The book’s chief copy editor, however, was Pam, who kept me on track and insisted I remain civil whenever I found myself writing about innkeeping’s tougher moments.

Dick Matthews