Tim Weed's Blog, page 10

A few scenes from the Pearl of the Antilles

Hey everyone,

Thought I’d share this link to a few photos of seascapes, landscapes, and cityscapes from the recent Brattleboro Museum & Art Center Cuba trip! These were taken in Havana, Trinidad, Cienega de Zapata National Park, and the Bay of Pigs.

If anyone’s interested in exploring ways to get down to the island in the next year or so, don’t hesitate to click here and/or get in touch.

Tim

New piece on rule-breaking for writers up at GrubWrites

“There’s an unwritten rule that dreams have no place in fiction. Perhaps you’re aware of it. No? Then maybe you haven’t taken enough workshops. It’s pretty high on the list of fiction-writing no-nos.”

[image error]Click here to read my thoughts on why fictional dreams AREN’T actually forbidden, and other thoughts on why breaking the rules is an essential skill for writers . . .

Two new reviews for A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing

Great to see these two recent reviews of A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing. (If you’re interested, I’ve collected excerpts from all known reviews so far here, along with links.)

[image error]The first is from Big Sky Journal, a “high-end, general interest magazine that captures the full range of culture and lifestyle in the Northern Rockies,” in a feature called “Reading the West”:

“Weed’s stories . . . have their roots in the relationships between men and boys, and between men and nature, and they are colored by his long experience as a travel and adventure writer . . . His characters are fishermen, mountaineers, and teenagers all on a quest for self-discovery. From the title page to the last page, this is a book of gems.”

And the second is from Pleiades, a literary journal dedicated to “literature in context.” I’m particularly fond of the way the reviewer, Susan Sugai, sees the stories as a kind of antidote to the distractions of modern social technology:

[image error]“Unlike fake news and misinformation found in Twitter feeds and Facebook posts, Weed’s short stories draw us away from the blue light of device screens.  Under the blue skies and dark waters of A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, readers can feel pain, empathy, and purpose bubbling out from the sharp-detailed mental images.” — Pleiades

 

Will Poole’s Island named to list of Best Young Adult Historical Fiction Books

[image error]Honored to be on this list, which also includes Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever 1793, Christopher Paul Curtis’ Bud, Not Buddy, and Ann Rinaldi’s Numbering All the Bones. An excerpt of the review on Homeschooling Teen website, the list’s publisher:

“This novel has everything a teen could hope for in a historical fiction book, including elements of magic, a journey across the sea and enough conflict and suspense to keep the pages turning. Moreover, the novel provides excellent, although indirect, commentary on current events.”

Find out everything you need to know about Will Poole’s Island here.

Cats & writers essay at LitHub

“The Half-Wild Muse: On Writers and their Cats” is up at Literary Hub. It was a fun essay to write and I hope fun to read as well. [image error]

More from me on writing and the writing life here.

“Tower Eight” nominated for a Pushcart

Pleased and very honored to report that Green Writers Press has nominated “Tower Eight” for the 2018 Pushcart Prize!  “Tower Eight” is the story of a pair of teenage misfits who do LSD and put themselves into various dangerous situations in rural New Hampshire, establishing a tight friendship as they hurtle toward a tragic end. (Grand Prize Winner, The Mountain (anthology), Outrider Press. Originally published in Gulf Coast.)[image error]

It’s the second story in A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, published in hardcover in April, 2017, and coming out in paperback in April 2018. (An excellent stocking stuffer, by the way. Just sayin’.)

To go or not to go? Traveling to Cuba and the situation on the ground

[image error]I’ve fielded quite a few questions in recent months about the advisability of travel to Cuba, given the stories that have been in the news over the last several months: the hurricane, the “sonic attacks,” and the new restrictions put out by the Trump administration.

Is it no longer possible/advisable/comfortable for Americans to travel to Cuba? Fresh from a wonderful contemporary Cuban art trip with my friend the painter Eric Aho and a group of ten intrepid travel companions, I’m finally in a position to report.

[image error]We had no problems with U.S. airport authorities, though we were asked for “paperwork” demonstrating that we were part of an educational group that was in compliance with the new regulations. I showed them our working itinerary, which was all they needed to see. Otherwise there were no barriers on the US side. For a summary of the new regulations, click here.

The flights down and back were nearly empty, a rare experience these days. You could stretch out on the seats, and there was plenty of room in the overheads. It made for an unusually easy and pleasant flight, though one couldn’t help feeling a little regretful on behalf of the many Cuban entrepreneurs who’d staked their futures on the openings for independent travelers under Obama—which have proved all too fleeting, from their perspective, under his successor.

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Construction cranes for two grand new hotels on the Prado are a sign that Cubans are still betting their future on tourism, despite Trump

In Havana, little has changed. Arriving in the city is always exhilarating—that feeling of being launched back in time, or at least to a place like nowhere else in the world. There is little visible damage left over from Hurricane Irma—and even less evidence of any effect of the so-called “sonic attacks” on diplomatic workers that have been reported in Havana (and more recently in Uzbekistan). The precise nature of these highly isolated incidents is unknown, what might have caused them, or even whether they were indeed attacks. Many Cubans I’ve spoken to are skeptical.

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These Cubans didn’t seem bothered by news of “sonic attacks”

In any case, there’s little evidence of nefarious events on the streets of Havana, where life goes on as normal. Uniformed schoolkids on the Prado playing soccer. Musicians and roller-bladers and lovers on the marble benches. The usual fishermen on the Malecón. Old cars in the street, families riding on motorcycles with sidecars, jineteros pushing cigars. People going about the business of daily life.

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The Malecón shows little sign of the flooding that occurred with Hurricane Irma

The main difference I could see is that there are so many fewer Americans on the streets than a year or even six months ago. Entrepreneurs have had to adjust their expectations, but there are still plenty of international tourists, so the situation isn’t as desperate as you might think. It’s a palpable slowdown, but everything hasn’t come grinding to a halt. Perhaps the Cubans don’t need us as much as we like to imagine.

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If you look very closely, you can see the ballet dancers behind some of the open windows

One day I got a little stomach bug and spent the day writing, going for short walks, and lounging around in my third-floor hotel room, which had a view into a dance school; I could peer through the breeze-ruffed curtains and watch the young dancers practice all day, reminding me again why I keep coming back to Cuba: the inspiration of being surrounded by people who take pride in their work – whether they are dancers, musicians, painters, mechanics, taxi drivers, fishermen or street sweepers. People who as a result of hard and disciplined daily practice are good at what they do, and find joy in that and in the textures of daily life. People of great, unflappable dignity who remain cheerful and friendly despite obstacles and hardships that are impossible to conceive for those of us that didn’t live them.

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Cuba’s natural areas have weathered countless hurricanes

In this regard as in many others, little has changed in Cuba. It’s still an architectural time capsule, a cultural and natural environment of astounding richness and beauty. It’s still as fun, interesting, and inspiring as ever for the traveler, whether you’re returning or visiting for the first time.

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A trip to Cuba at this moment in history is an act of resistance against those who would impinge on our freedom to travel, and in the process damage the fortunes of the same free-market pioneers the new policies claim to support. More importantly, it is a chance increase the bonds of friendship between ourselves and our brothers and sisters on this special island.

Now is as great a time as ever to travel to Cuba. Read more about the options for doing that here.

 

 

Back to Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia

[image error]It’s been a few years, and I’m thrilled to be returning to one of my favorite regions on the planet with National Geographic Expeditions’ Exploring Patagonia program. This season I’m slated to accompany two trips: one in November, 2017 and a second in January, 2018. We’ll be cruising through Tierra del Fuego in a small, expertly crewed, Chilean-owned ship, the M.V. Stella Australis. We’ll embark from Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost city, round Cape Horn, and make our way up through the Magdalena Passage and the Agostini Sound, taking advantage of daily Zodiac landings to explore Hornos Island, Wulaia Bay, glaciers, and penguin colonies. Fantastic!

[image error]The Stella Australis will then drop us off in Punta Arenas, Chile, and we’ll head up to the stunning wilderness of Torres del Paine, where we’ll have daily opportunities to wander, both on foot and horseback. We can expect to see guanaco, rhea, Andean condor, many other bird species, and possibly even a puma or two. But it’s the vastness and sublime beauty of these wilderness landscapes that is the true highlight here. This part of the world is one of the least densely populated on earth, and it’s never short of inspiring!

[image error]I’m excited to be leading the educational aspects of the program in my role as National Geographic’s “featured expert.” Other than informal group interactions the main element of this task is to give a series of illustrated talks: an intro to the history and geography of the region; Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle; American artist and adventurer Rockwell Kent; Ivon Chounard, Douglas Tomkins and “los Fun Hogs.”

[image error]I’ll also be giving a brand new talk that I’m thrilled to debut in Patagonia, in which I’ll attempt to make sense of the links between travel, fiction, place-based writing, all in the context of this strange hybrid career of mine.

If you’re signed up for either of these trips, I look forward to traveling with you. If not, stay tuned: there are likely to be similar opportunities in the future!

A conversation about writing with James Scott of TK Podcast

[image error]Really enjoyed my conversation with James Scott on the latest episode of his terrific series of literary conversations known as the TK Podcast. James is a bestselling novelist (The Kept) and an excellent interviewer, with a real knack for asking questions about writing and life that lead to interesting places.

We talked about travel, the writing life, the binary nature of solitude, National Geographic, short fiction, how to sequence stories in a short fiction collection, the Cuba Writers Program, Ingmar Bergman, drug writing, Green Writers Press, Denis Johnson, The Grateful Dead, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Paul Bowles, and much, much more. Highly recommended if you’re a writer and/or a fan of literary podcasts! Here’s the link.

 

 

 

New Hampshire Public Radio interview

[image error]What a pleasure to travel up to Concord recently for an interview with NHPR’s All Things Considered host Peter Biello about nature, fiction, Rome, teaching, The Grateful Dead, and A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing. Peter is a writer himself, in addition to being a very fine interviewer and radio personality, and we had a lot to talk about.

Click here to listen to a podcast of the seven and a half minute interview. I think you’ll enjoy it!