We haven’t talked books in a while, but I’ve got a great one for you this week. It’s the best novel I’ve read in recent months. The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson is set in a mysterious old farmhouse in Provence, France. And that location permeates every page, the way the sun soaks through the olive leaves and lavender fields of the south. Rather than try to sum up the book, I’ve copied and pasted...
I still remember when I got the call to do my first magazine assignment. It was in the spring of 2005. I’d just sold my first big feature to Outpost, about an expedition by camel into the sandy wastes of the Taklamakan Desert. As fate would have it, that desert piece was rejected the first time around. But Outpost changed editors about a year later, and someone found my story in the slush pile...
I visited the public library in my hometown over the Christmas holidays. I hadn’t been back in about 15 years. The children’s section was just as I remembered it. But the rest had changed dramatically. The building finally got a much needed renovation and expansion, and the adult section I browsed in for so many years has been transformed into offices and a comfortable, quiet reading area. The...
…well I didn’t exactly get a starred review, but my book did. No one evaluated me as a person (…and I’m sure if they did, they’d expel me as a bad influence…). Although they did refer to me as “a powerful new voice in creative nonfiction.” Which I thought was kinda nice. But yeah, Vagabond Dreams got the red star. According to their website, “Starred reviews are given to books...
I promised to give you an update on the signing I did at Leeds County Books this past week… Despite a blizzard that smothered the region in several inches of snow, the turnout was excellent. It was supposed to be 2 hours long but I was there for a full 3 hours, with a nonstop stream of people lined up to the door the entire time. According to the guy at the bookstore, the average number of...
I’m doing a book signing for Vagabond Dreams on December 29th, 2012 in Brockville, Ontario. This will be my only visit to North America in 2012 / 2013, so I hope you can make it. Want to get your copy signed, share a travel story — or even give me a piece of your mind? Don’t miss this opportunity! I will sign copies of the book, household items, high school memorabilia, and selected parts of the...
I was in Barbados for work a couple weeks ago. We had meetings of course, but most of the time we sat on the terrance of our rented villa, with laptops open next to a windswept view of the sea. I didn’t have much opportunity to check out the island. But I did make time to taste some rum. It could be said that rum is Barbados’s legacy to the world. Barbados saw some of the earliest development of...
My proudest high school moment wasn’t an academic or sporting achievement. I failed several classes and I was never part of a team. No, my proudest achievement was a food fight. The biggest food fight in the history of my school. I wonder how many of my friends knew that me and Jim started the whole thing? There were a lot of small skirmishes leading up to it, of course. Low level food fights...
I promised to update you on this year’s olive harvest. If you read my earlier blog — Time to Harvest the Olives — you’ll know that I have 12 olive trees on the roof of my house. Each tree is a different variety; some are table olives and some are used for oil. The sun dissolved the paper tags long ago, so we can no longer identify which is which. We carefully fertilized each tree last spring. And...
I was in Belgium recently for a bit of an escape. That’s the thing about living on a small island. You’ve gotta get away on a regular basis or the walls start to feel like they’re closing in. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy living here. The weather’s perfect, and things are easy. But an island is always a self-contained world. An extreme micro-universe. It’s necessary to get out of that setting every...
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