I hate ads. I hate listening to them when I listen to podcasts, and I don’t want to inflict them on you, either. I want to keep my conversations with the world’s most interesting writers both free — no paywalls — and ad-free, so I’ve moved Personal Landscapes to Substack. New episodes will be emailed to subscribers automatically, so please sign up to the free tier on my new Substack to stay...
Clair Wills Clair Wills was in her twenties when she learned she had a cousin she’d never met. It wasn’t as though their families drifted apart. She’d never been told of this person’s existence. It was shrouded in shame and secrecy, and she wanted to understand why. She pieced the story together from forgotten anecdotes, dim memories and institutional archives spanning four generations of...
Deborah Lawrenson What would you do if someone you knew your entire life — your mother — suddenly revealed that she’d been a spy? Deborah Lawrenson turned her story into a novel. The tangled web of espionage she weaves in The Secretary is fiction, but the background to the story is authentic, drawn in part from a seemingly innocent diary her mother wrote in 1958 while working at the...
Join me on the Interlocutor podcast I spoke with Tyrel Eskelson of the Interlocutor Podcast recently and the episode was published yesterday. It starts with some questions about my first book, Vagabond Dreams. That was a nice surprise because it all seems so long ago. We also talked about breaking into magazine travel writing. And of course life in Malta and my recent book A Sunny Place for Shady...
New podcast appearance Do you miss me? Wait… maybe it’s better if you don’t answer that. I was going to ask if you missed the velvety tone of my voice, but I’m missing it, too. What I hear instead is the cracked, sleep-deprived voice of an introvert who spends too much time alone in a room. If you’re looking for a dose of THAT, you’re in luck. I spoke with Chris Braucks about Malta and my book A...
Michael Asher In 1986, Michael Asher and his wife Mariantonietta Peru set out to cross the Sahara from west to east, by camel and on foot. Asher was already a seasoned desert traveler who’d learned his camel skills in Sudan’s Darfur region. He met his wife — an aid worker and photographer — in Khartoum, but they’d only been married for five days when they ventured into the sands. Their...
First glimpse of the Greenland ice sheet I flew over Greenland last November on the way to Seattle from Reykjavik. Despite a lifetime of staring at maps — okay, obsessing over maps — I didn’t understand the enormity of the Greenland ice sheet. It took nearly an hour to cross it at 800 km/h. Signs of life on the edge of Greenland Leaving Greenland We flew towards the setting sun. On the left...
Charles Nicholl Arthur Rimbaud turned French poetry on its head in his late teens. He took the Baudelairean medium of the prose poem, injected adolescent rage, slang and a remarkable inventiveness with language to create his visionary masterpiece A Season in Hell and a shimmering collection of Illuminations. His work influenced everyone from the modernists and the Beats to Bob Dylan and Jim...
Malbork Castle Winter darkness still shrouded the streets as we trudged through the centre of Gdansk to the railway station, with a quick stop at a well-lit bakery for coffee and sandwiches to go. An hour on the train passed in a sleep-deprived blur of green fields and grassy embankments that opened into castle views right before we pulled into the station. The red brick bulk of Malbork caste...
Paul Theroux Nearly all of Paul Theroux’s fiction is about a person — usually male, often a writer — trying to solve a problem. In several of the stories from The Vanishing Point, his new collection, that problem doesn’t have a solution. He describes a vanishing point as a moment when seemingly all the lines running through one’s life converge and one can see no further, yet we must deal...