National Geographic Expeditions’ new Patagonia video
August 4, 2015 § 2 Comments
Check out this inspiring two-minute video from National Geographic Expeditions’ talented videographer Steve Pickard. It features an interview Steve did with yours truly in my capacity as the featured expert for the Exploring Patagonia program. Warning: it’s going to make you want to go to Tierra del Fuego and southern Patagonia!
Star Island lecture series
July 10, 2015 § Leave a comment
Looking forward to discovering a brand new corner of the world next week: Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire. I’ll have a chance to get some creative work done and explore the Atlantic waters around the island, and, as the theme speaker for participants in the All-Star 2 Family Conference, I’ll be delivering a five part lecture series: “Life Stories: Creative Adventurers, Adventurous Creators.” I’ve had a lot of fun planning and researching these lectures, which focus on figures who have engaged in a deep and life-changing way with some of the parts of the world that are important to me from life and work. Here are the subjects:
The Life and Times of Francisco de Goya
Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle
Ernest Hemingway in Spain and Cuba
Georgia O’Keeffe: American Visionary
In my final talk I’ll discuss how my own engagement with place influenced the writing of Will Poole’s Island.
If you or an organization you belong to is interested in booking me for one of these talks or something new, send me a note. My schedule is busy but flexible, and I love doing this kind of thing. It’s quite possible that we can work it out!
Author interview: Inside Historical Fiction
April 21, 2015 § 2 Comments
It was a pleasure to be interviewed recently by the author M.K. Tod for her Inside Historical Fiction series. We had a nice talk about the ingredients that go into the making of great historical fiction, the research process, recent trends in the genre, and more. Here’s an excerpt:
MKT: Are historical novels inherently different from contemporary novels, and if so, in what ways?
TW: There’s a quote that I love from Andrew Miller, writing in The New York Times Book Review a few years ago, about the appeal of distance, and of “the strangeness such distance produces and of the lives lived recognizably in the midst of that strangeness.” He compared historical fiction to science fiction, pointing out that both genres require the writer to depict the only world he or she can possibly know—“the here and now”—in other terms.
To me, this notion captures much of what I love about historical fiction, both in the writing and in the reading: it’s at once a dream we have to enter and an oblique reflection of ourselves. In my experience, this kind of mind-altering immersion is harder to find in contemporary novels—if by “contemporary” we mean novels that are set in times and places very similar to the quotidian spheres in which we tend to live out our lives.
Read the full interview here.
New nonfiction adventure story out at Bloom
April 17, 2015 § 3 Comments
Very pleased to report the publication of my narrative essay, “Extreme Parenting,” at Bloom. I’ve long admired Bloom, which is associated with The Millions and is dedicated to the work of writers whose first novels have been published after the age of forty, so it’s a great honor to appear there. The essay had its genesis in an “extreme” ski trip I took with my son and some friends a few years back. Here’s an excerpt:
I wasn’t worried for my own safety, but I was frightened on behalf of my 13-year-old son. The truth is, I hadn’t fully appreciated the difficulty of the spot I’d gotten us into. Below us, a knotted climbing rope disappeared into a narrow chute that was the only way down through a two hundred foot cliff band. There was no question of climbing back up; we’d skied fifteen hundred vertical feet of steep powder to get here, and this was the heart of avalanche country. Our guide was irrevocably out of sight, having painstakingly lowered himself and Joe, my son’s ski buddy, down the climbing rope to arrive at what was presumably safer terrain beneath the cliff band.
So here we were. Early this morning eight of us had strapped on avalanche beacons and packs with shovels and rescue probes and voluntarily entered the most extreme and dangerous lift-served terrain on the continent. My son Toby was next in line, then Brad, a new friend, then it was my turn. I’d been watching Toby, and I could tell from pallor of his face beneath the helmet and goggles that he was scared to death. Not that he would ever admit as much, but I could see it.
“Brad. Do you mind if we switch places?”
Read the rest of the piece here.
Tim Weed 