Announcing new travel programs
September 1, 2022 § 1 Comment
In the works are several new small-group trips abroad:
November 30 – December 7, 2022: Informal “Family & Friends” trip to Cuba (Havana, Cienfuegos, Playa Larga – contact by email for more info)
January 7 – 15, 2023: Newport MFA Writing Workshop in Cuba (Havana & Playa Larga: open to non-MFA writers on a first-come, first served basis)
April 10 – 17, 2023: Art & Cuisine of Oaxaca, Mexico (further details will be posted here when they’re available)
If you’re interested in learning more about any of these travel programs, just shoot me an email or use the contact page .
If none of these work with your schedule but this kind of trip IS of interest and you don’t want to wait another year (more or less) for one of these update emails to hit your inbox, please feel free bookmark the frequently updated “Upcoming” page.
To explore ideas about creating custom trips for small groups of family, friends, educational institutions, etc, again, just reply to this email or send me a note through the “Contact” page.
Save the dates: Cuba trips planned for Fall ’21 and Winter ’22
March 3, 2021 § Leave a comment
As many of you reading this will know, I’ve had a decades-long engagement with Cuba. The country has been something of obsession for me since 1999, when I was fortunate enough to scout and lead the first U.S. student travel program to visit the island since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. It possesses a sui generis mystique that’s impossible to fully express, a combination of living history, sensory opulence, cultural and artistic magnificence, and hard-to-read political undercurrents that I find endlessly fascinating. The pandemic, meanwhile, terrible as it has been, has given all of us time out to reflect, and also to recharge our curiosity in terms of getting back out into the world.
Evenings on the Malecón.
SPECIAL NOTE: DUE TO THE CONTINUING PANDEMIC, THESE PROGRAMS HAVE BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FALL ’22 AND/OR SPRING ’23. Please send a quick note using the contact form if you want to add your name to the list of interested parties!
Nov 28 – Dec 5, 2021: Havana, Cienfuegos, Playa Larga
This highly enjoyable and culturally rich trip will be of special interest to creative types: artists, writers, musicians, dancers, photographers—along with their families, and really anyone who is interested in being exposed to the vibrant and ubiquitous creative life of central/western Cuba.
We’ll be dropping in on music and dance groups and community arts projects, visiting with painters and sculptors in their homes and studios, hitting a few spots on the Hemingway trail, eating at some of Cuba’s most interesting paladares, and enjoying time on our own to sample Havana’s great music scene in the evenings.
What makes the trip special is the opportunity to touch base with an extensive network of talented, luminous Cuban artists, writers, musicians, dancers—many of whom are personal friends whom I haven’t seen in too long.
And we’ll be finishing with several days in the pleasant Caribbean town of Playa Larga, with good access to beaches, snorkeling, and world-class birdwatching in Ciénega de Zapata National Park.
April 9 – 17, 2022: Central Cuba Road Trip: Havana, Trinidad, and other sites TBD
Of the probably 40 or 50 trips I’ve made to Cuba, one of my favorites was a month-long writing program for students, in which we started in Santiago and ended in Havana with an extended road trip across the entire island in between. This shorter version will begin and end in Havana, but will get us out to some of the fascinating and very lightly visited central regions of the island east of Havana.
Suitable for people who’ve either been to the island before and/or are ready for a more off-the-beaten track adventure. In addition to Havana and Trinidad, we’ll be tapping the knowledge of longstanding local contacts to explore lesser-known rural areas, including places that don’t get many foreign visitors.
The exact itinerary is TBD, but we’ll be focusing on natural areas, community projects, Santería, and organic agriculture.
In my experience the best adventures come with a generous dose of the unknown – which can mean periods of wasted time, travel on sometimes slow roads, and an occasional activity that doesn’t pan out exactly as expected—but with the advantage of spontaneous opportunities that may arise and the opportunity to meet and interact with new Cuban friends along the way!
Special Note on private trips:
I encourage you to explore the idea of setting up a custom small-group trip for friends/family, which is generally quite possible if you have between 3 and 12 people interested. It’s actually a surprisingly affordable way to go, and I’m happy to discuss it with you without any obligation if you’re interested. Just send me a message!
PPS. For those interested in writing programs, I direct the Newport MFA’s winter residency in Havana, Jan 2-9, 2022, which is open to writers outside the program, along with non-writing significant others & family members!
New short fiction out
November 25, 2018 § Leave a comment
A freshly-minted short story (one of the first to appear post-A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing) is out in Western Press Books’ wonderful new anthology, Manifest West: Transitions & Transformations. The story is titled “Gunnison Gorge.” It concerns a lonely traveler who gives a ride to a mysterious couple on his way to a remote fly fishing river in a wilderness area of central Colorado. He worries that the woman may be in some kind of trouble, and believes himself well-positioned to do something about it.
To read “Gunnison Gorge,” at least for now, you have to order the anthology. But that’s a great thing to do anyway, especially if you want to support literature and/or are interested in writing about the contemporary American west!
Return Engagement: Tierra del Fuego & Southern Patagonia
November 4, 2018 § 3 Comments
On this key midterm election day in the USA, I’m so thrilled to be heading back (after voting, of course) to one of my favorite corners of planet Earth, an area of vast and stunning wilderness encompassing the islands, waters, and mountain ranges of the southernmost reaches of the South American continent.
We’ll be stopping over for a few days in Buenos Aires, but the real adventure begins in Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost city, as we board the Stella Australis, a small (150-200 passenger) Chilean-run cruise ship, and set off into the stark and storied landscapes and seascapes of Tierra del Fuego.
We’ll visit the legendary Cape Horn, making a landing if the weather allows, and then follow in the wake of Charles Darwin’s Beagle and use zodiacs to explore various fascinating features, including fjords, tidewater glaciers, a penguin colony, and pristine high latitude temperate rainforests of this spectacular convergence of land, sea and ice, we’ll be on the lookout for whales, sea lions, penguins, albatross and many other fascinating bird species.
Next, we’ll stay in the amazing Tierra Patagonia hotel at the foot of the dramatic granite spires and horns of Torres del Paine National Park. Here we’ll have several full days of hiking and/or horseback riding amidst one of the world’s most striking landscapes, in a part of Chile with some of the lowest human population densities on the planet.
This rich and diverse ecosystem is of particular interest to us because it includes an apex predator, the elusive puma, and its primary prey, the charming and highly entertaining guanaco. What a magnificent opportunity!
This will be my fifth time on this particular National Geographic itinerary, and I’m thrilled to be heading back. One of the advantages of being a writer is that it’s a multi-disciplinary pursuit—and a trip like this provides great material.
I’m a big fan of history, geography, ecology, and biography as disciplines that enrich any travel experience, and it will be my privilege to share some of those wide-ranging interests with the National Geographic group.
Talks will focus on the history and geography of the region and the lives of explorers and adventurers who went on to make important contributions to humanity and the planet—and whose early lives were shaped by their journeys to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. My final talk will be more personal in nature, about my parallel careers as a novelist and travel guide, the links between travel, writing, and environmental awareness, and what I call the “geographic imagination.”
All in all, it promises to be an unforgettable experience. This is a really fantastic part of the world and I highly recommend you get there if you can. I could be convinced, by the way, to organize a custom trip or two if anyone’s interested . . .
Main Street Rag Reviews A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing
May 13, 2018 § Leave a comment
Very much enjoyed the new review of the collection by Evan Williams in the Spring 2018 edition of the venerable literary magazine Main Street Rag. It’s not available on-line, but here’s an excerpt:
“Each story is an exercise in high adventure. Cessna prop planes, dugout canoes, rattletrap sports cars, and hipped-out VW vans transport characters across America to Grateful Dead concerts, and up the Amazon River in search of a new species of frog. The author’s attraction for the outdoors in inescapable, with each installment a trip to another country, or occasionally, a mind trip on LSD . . . Weed writes as a realist, never coddling his stars. Teeth are kicked out, and hearts are broken. Perhaps gritty is the optimum word to describe his treatment of behavior and consequence, where even the innocent are not insulated from the impact of their decisions, nor the decisions of unkind others. In A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, no one is granted immunity from life . . . Provocative and memorable, this collection strikes all the right chords.”
You can see how this is a review to make an author happy. The collection just came out in paperback: click here for instructions on how to order!
Will Poole’s Island named to list of Best Young Adult Historical Fiction Books
February 8, 2018 § Leave a comment
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.
Back to Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia
November 2, 2017 § 2 Comments
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!
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!
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.”
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
August 29, 2017 § Leave a comment
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 Cuba/writing essay up at Cleaver
June 2, 2017 § Leave a comment
“The blackout was a revelation. It happened at around eight PM, in Trinidad, Cuba, on one of those moonless tropical nights that fall so suddenly you barely notice the dusk. This was several years ago—before the loosening of travel regulations that occurred under President Obama—and the number of American tourists remained small . . . At the time of the occurrence described in this essay, I was traveling to the country with cultural tourism groups at least half a dozen times a year.”
Click here to read the full essay.
Tim Weed 