Bruce Chatwin Bruce Chatwin’s first book — In Patagonia — changed our idea of what travel writing could be. Its structural is elliptical, almost episodic. Its truth is somewhere between fact and fiction. Its richly descriptive prose is built with short, simple sentences peppered with arcane words and a rich vocabulary. Chatwin described it as a ‘cubist’ portrait. The author was as...
Unfinished Woman by Robyn Davidson From the very first pages of her new memoir, Robyn Davidson grapples with how to recollect the past. “The way memory plays in the mind is not factual,” she writes. “It is sketchy, mythical, misremembered, contradictory. It is flickers of light on unfathomable darkness. We go back over and over the past, watching it change with each take, not thinking of it as...
My friend Lawrence Millman believes stories are essential to our survival. He’s spent his writing life tracking them down and preserving them, from East Greenland to the forgotten corners of the Canadian North. This obsession was present from his first book, Our Like Will Not Be There Again, in which he sets out to record the “wonder tales, jokes, violent opinions, and self-contained monologues”...
Did you miss my live stream conversation with writer Lawrence Millman on Tuesday? I heard there was some sort of election in the US. Surely you weren’t watching that instead?! Don’t you want to know what drink pairs best with bird droppings…? Aren’t you curious about how he scared away a mother grizzly and her cubs by flashing his genitals at them…? Do you really mean to tell me you don’t want to...
Dervla Murphy (Photo from ) You may have already heard the sad news. But for those who haven’t… Dervla Murphy has died, aged 90. Her journey ended peacefully at home, with her daughter Rachel by her side. Old age was finally catching up to her. She continued to travel well into her 80s, but she wasn’t getting around very well in recent years. She never lost her curiosity, though, or her...
Do you have a book addiction? Well I’m here to make it worse. I love a good reading list like a hobo loves Aqua Velva. As the year comes to a close, and as dark Berlin huddles beneath a pandemic sky, I’d like to take a moment to share my top reads from the past twelve months. Each book made my list because it was memorable, important, or just thoroughly enjoyable. And each is worth your time. I...
Ronald Wright traveled Peru in the 1970’s and 80’s, fresh from university with a degree in archaeology, feeding an obsession with the Inca Empire sparked by a random adventure novel he’d read in his teens. He expected to spend his time wandering ruins, but the ancient world of the Andes was alive all around him in the Quechua still spoken by its people, through the handwoven clothing they...
How did I live for 47 years without reading Martha Gellhorn? She’s best known in some circles for her brief wartime marriage to the writer Ernest Hemingway, much to her chagrin. But she is better known as a brilliant war correspondent and travel writer, though she wanted to be remembered as a novelist. She covered the Spanish Civil War, went ashore on the beaches of Normandy on June 7, 1944, and...
Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989? I was sitting in the back room of our old house watching music videos on TV. We didn’t have the specialty channels back then, but the cable company was running a free promo all week, and we could watch the movie channel and the music channel for free. I was 17 years old, and glued to MuchMusic — the Canadian version of MTV — when the...
“So it goes” recurs like a refrain throughout this collection of essays, and I found myself wishing it would go on and on. Nicolas Bouvier is one of those legendary writers whose name circulates among travelers, but few of my North American road friends had ever heard of him. It was European friends who told me about his classic road trip book, The Way of the World. The twenty-four year old Swiss...