|
Inspired Journeys
Travel Writers in Search of the Muse
Edited by Brian Bouldrey
Despite yourself, you arrive, and you’ve become someone else
Full of humor, profundity, and obsession, these are tales of writers on peregrine paths. Some set out in search of legends or artistic inspiration; others seek spiritual epiphany or fulfillment of a promise. Their journeys lead them variously to Dracula’s castle, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s prairie, the Grimms’ fairy-tale road, Mayan temples, Nathaniel West’s California, the Camino de Santiago trail, Scott’s Antarctica, the Marquis de Sade’s haunted manor, or the sacred city of Varanasi. All of these pilgrimages are worthy journeys—redemptive and serious. But a time-honored element of pilgrimage is a suspension of rules, and there is absurdity and exuberance here as well.
Brian Bouldrey has written eight books, including Honorable Bandit: A Walk across Corsica, and edited six anthologies, including Traveling Souls. He teaches creative writing at Northwestern University and gave the 2016 keynote address to the American pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.
Contributors: John Beckman, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Brian Bouldrey, Charles Coe, Jonathan Monroe Geltner, Goldie Goldbloom, Miles Harvey, Raphael Kadushin, David Stuart MacLean, Marta Maretich, Kimberly Meyer, Jivin Misra, Susan Fox Rogers, Sharman Apt Russell, Russell Scott Valentino, Rachel Jamison Webster
Praise
“The tremendously satisfying and uplifting sense of these essays is the ongoing nature of human pilgrimage, whether to the center of the self or the ends of the earth. After reading this book, I want to go on a journey myself! Highly recommended.”
—Antonya Nelson, author of Bound
“These stories of pilgrimage span six continents, touch on eons of history, and offer insights and quirky anecdotes told without melodrama or excess baggage. Like Chaucer’s travelers in the Canterbury Tales, each writer included here is a distinctive and entertaining storyteller.”
—Gillian Kendall, author of Mr. Ding’s Chicken Feet
|
Larger images
November 2016
LC: 2016013571 G
280 pp. 5½ x 8¼
|
