David Gessner, author of Under the Devil’s Thumb and the forthcoming Return of the Osprey, teaches creative nonfiction at Harvard Extension School.

More and more I believe that stories and place are what hold up together, as well as what keep us whole. And our stories must meet the challenge of our lives. Over the last six years cancer has ripped through my family-scarring me, killing my father, leaving my mother bereaved, uprooting my brother-and what this has taught me, again and again, is that in the face of chaos and nothingness we must stick to our best stories. Not stories beamed from a box or blazing off a supermarket magazine cover but those that grow out of the ground, that flow up out of the dirt or sand or water through the veins of our toes and legs and torsos until, last and least, they reach our brains.

Gessner’s introspection during a year spent writing in the family’s weathered cottage portrays another struggle, too. For a young writer just beginning his career, such mighty literary forebears as Thoreau can be imposing, if not paralyzing. Yet the process of sorting through and making peace with the memories of his genetic father gives Gessner the power to declare artistic independence from his literary one. Seeing “something tremendously heroic” about his father’s determination to perform mundane tasks in the face of imminent death brings Gessner to realize that “our minds have minds of their own. Reality is fabulous, yes, but we also crave something more. Symbol, perhaps. Meaning.” In the end, what Cape Cod comes to mean for Gessner is not just freedom from the past, but love and nobility in the face of death.