The trip of a lifetime

On Friday, Oct. 24, Kristen Alger launched her second book, Letters of a Traveling Architect, a true Romeo-and-Juliet love story with twists, turns and everything in between.

“I have been writing for about 12 years,” said Alger. “I was a math, science and religion teacher with a love for storytelling. Children would listen to my stories, and adults followed.”

Alger taught for nine years and captivated hundreds of kids with her stories.
When COVID hit, she decided, with a little convincing from her husband, to turn her stories into a memoir of her life and her own travels.

“Everything I have done in my life has led me to writing this second book,” Alger said.

Alger’s journey to that second book began 30 years ago at Levi Alphonse Geniesse’s 1930s family home, when she stumbled upon old photographs in the basement, which she restored and archived.

Along with the pictures, Alger stumbled upon a stack of letters.

As a former stamp collector, she immediately recognized that these were from the 1920s.

And so started her path of understanding who Geniesse was and the love he held for a Presbyterian woman, Chole Wells, as a Chalolic man unfolded.
Alger found herself in Wells’ cabin some time later, where she connected with a relative who invited her in.

Alger had known from Genisse’s stack of letters that Wells would write from an upstairs bedroom which, come to find out, was now just the attic, where Alger found a steam trunk filled with letters.

“It was stuffy and hard to breathe in the attic, so we knew we couldn’t stay much longer, but something was calling me to the last trunk in the corner. I opened it up and found it filled with papers and letters.” Alger said. “We got the chance to take as many letters as we could handle.”

Alger had every thought that her second book was going to be a novel. She soon realized that would never be the case.

“My job in writing this book was to let them [Geniesse and Wells] tell their story, and I would fill in any gaps,” Alger said. “Despite being a creative nonfiction, this history is so good it reads like fiction.”

Launched on the date Genisse stepped aboard a steamship, this book explores his trip of a lifetime and the biggest question readers will be asking throughout — will Genisse and Wells end up together?

Letters of a Traveling Architect is available at amazon.com/dp/B0FVTWS9KZ.