Getting to Grey Owl Journeys on Four Continents

by Caswell, Kurt

• ISBN13: 9781595342614
• ISBN10: 1595342613
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-07-21
• Publisher: Trinity University Press

Summary

Writer, teacher, and adventurer Kurt Caswell has spent his adult life canoeing, hiking, and pedaling his way toward a deeper understanding of our vast and varied world. Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents chronicles over twenty years of Caswell’s travels as he buys a rug in Morocco, rides a riverboat in China, attends a bullfight in Spain, climbs four mountains in the United Kingdom, and backpacks a challenging route through Iceland’s wild Hornstrandir Peninsula. Writing in the tradition of such visionary nomads as Hermann Hesse, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, Caswell travels through wild and urban landscapes, as well as philosophical and ideological vistas, championing the pleasures of a wandering life. Far from the trappings of the everyday, he explores a range of ideas: the meaning of roads and pathways, the story of Cain and Abel, nomadic life and the evolution of the human animal, the role of agriculture in the making of the modern world, and the fragility of love.

Author Biography

Kurt Caswell is a writer and associate professor of creative writing and literature in the honors college at Texas Tech University, where he teaches intensive field courses in writing and leadership in the mountains and on rivers in the West. He is also on the faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Caswell is the author of In the Sun's House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation and An Inside Passage, which won the 2008 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, and the co-editor of the anthology To Everything on Earth: New Writing on Fate, Community, and Nature. His essays have appeared in ISLE, Isotope, Matter, Ninth Letter, Orion, River Teeth, McSweeney's, Terrain, and the American Literary Review. He lives in Lubbock, TX.