Read the beginning of Chapter 2 from Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton:

"The year before I bought the motorcycle, summer 1972, I went to Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, nervously bearing a thin sheaf of poems. At age 33, I was away from home alone for the first time since I had married ten years before. My children were 9, 7, 5, 2, and 10 months. I weaned the baby from breastfeeding in order to go.

Many strange things happened on that mountaintop, and this was one of them: One morning, toward the end of the two-week conference, William Lederer, a famous writer and teacher on the Bread Loaf staff, stopped me on the stair and said, “Last night, I dreamed you were going to write a book about people surviving without eating each other.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Most people survive by eating each other,” he said. “You’re going to write a book that shows a better way.”

“How do I do that?” I asked.

“How would I know?” he said. “It’s your book, not mine.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but he was a mysterious old man—I see now he couldn’t have been more than 60—who had mesmerized me with his tales of travel and adventure. He had witnessed the Long March, a massive military retreat of Chinese communists in 1934, and I can still almost stand there with him as day turned to night, watching the never-ending silhouettes of those thousands upon thousands who traversed eight thousand miles of impossible terrain for a year, only one-tenth surviving. He also trafficked in the occult, which, in that rarified atmosphere, gave him an air of spooky prescience. I didn’t tell anyone about his dream.

I had gone to Bread Loaf as a contributor in poetry, then came home and signed up to audit two poetry courses at the University of Maryland. I also started writing a short story that began with a mental image of a woman in an unfamiliar room. When I asked myself what she was doing there, I answered that she had just completed a grueling cross-country motorcycle trip with her lover. Motorcycle trip? In one of my poetry classes, I found a cyclist and endlessly pumped him for details.

Many drafts later, I realized I had brought my characters three thousand miles across the country in a physical void, not one blade of grass. I studied state maps and children’s geography books.

“Tell me again about coming cross-country,” I said one Saturday night to my husband, who had made the trip by car several times. He went slowly, reliving his memories. It grew late; I was tired, bored. “Then we went to this great diner . . . ,” Roger said.

I stared at the fluorescent light in the kitchen, his voice droning. “You’d have to go over Donner Pass.”

“Mmm?”

“Donner Pass. You know, where they ate each other to survive.” I snapped awake. “What did you say?”

But I had heard what he said."

Gabrielle Burton is a writer whose numerous projects include the film Manna from Heaven, which she wrote and produced, and the novel Heartbreak Hotel, which won Scribner’s 1985 Maxwell Perkins Prize, an award for a first work of fiction. Mostly recently, she authored a novel she imagined as Tamsen Donner's journal, Impatient with Desire: The Lost Journal of Tamsen Donner. Burton's writing has also appeared in publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. She lives in Venice, California.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Searching for Tamsen Donner, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Searching-for-Tamsen-Donner,674054.aspx.