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.
New short fiction at Pangyrus
June 29, 2021 § 2 Comments
Great to see my new short story, “The Tawny-Green Steppe,” up at the beautifully edited and produced Pangyrus literary magazine. The story, a reimagining of Charles Darwin’s adventures in Tierra del Fuego and the Argentine pampas, was shortlisted for the 2021 Fish International Short Story Prize.
My focus over these last few years has been on novels, so it’s wonderful to be back in the short fiction game. Link to full story here.
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!
Porto to Salamanca on a Douro River cruise
September 20, 2019 § 3 Comments
Excited to return to one of my favorite corners of the planet to embark on this new National Geographic program, my first in nearly a year.
In my capacity as featured expert I’ll be delivering a series of lectures on the long, colorful history of the Iberian peninsula, from the earliest clues about human life to the Romans and the Moors and the rise and fall of the Hapsburg dynasty—and possibly beyond that, if we have time, to Francisco de Goya and the Peninsular War.
If there’s enough interest, I’ll also be offering an ad hoc field-based creative writing workshop, and hopefully getting some of my own scribbling done too.
Also looking forward to visiting some of the fascinating sites we have on the itinerary, meeting everyone else on our river ship, the Scenic Azure, and of course sampling some delicious food, wine, and port!
New Cuba travel essay out
May 2, 2019 § 2 Comments
Pleased to report the appearance of a new travel essay, “Cuba After Fidel,” out in Wanderlust: The Best of 2019 Anthology.
Here’s the opening paragraph:
“At dusk on the evening of November 29, 2016, three days after the announcement of Fidel Castro’s death, I set off on foot with a small group of friends to Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución for a memorial rally attended by perhaps half a million people. It was not good planning but simple dumb luck that I’d booked a flight to Havana a few days after the revolutionary leader’s death, just as the official mourning period was getting underway. I was determined to take advantage. As a frequent visitor to Cuba since the late nineties, and in light of the diametrically conflicting narratives surrounding the revolutionary leader’s life, I’ve struggled to come to a satisfactory conclusion about Fidel Castro. This trip seemed to present an excellent opportunity to find out how the Cubans themselves felt about him—not the exiles celebrating in the streets of Miami, whose feelings were clear enough, but those Cubans who’d spent most or all of their lives in the society he’d presided over and shaped.”
If you’re a fan of travel writing and/or want to read on, you can buy the anthology here.
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 . . .
Podcast: The Rocky Mountain Writer
October 16, 2018 § Leave a comment
What a pleasure it was to spend part of a recent afternoon having this wide-ranging conversation with Colorado novelist Mark Stevens on The Rocky Mountain Writer podcast.
We discussed many topics of interest to writers and readers, including A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, travel and fiction, Ecuadorian volcanoes, Venezuela’s Orinoco basin, Eastern Cuba, fiction vs autobiography, the importance of place in fiction, dropping acid and pushing the bounds of objective reality, interiority and loneliness, The Grateful Dead and the Eleusinian Mysteries, fly fishing as metaphor, Ursula K. LeGuin, William Golding’s The Inheritors, Newport MFA & the Cuba Writers Program, and a recap of a talk I gave on “The Essentials of Voice” at RMFW’s Colorado Gold conference in September, 2018.
Listen to the entire podcast here. Mark also did a wonderful followup print interview here, in which we talked about life experience as a point of departure for fiction, the deep sources of story ideas, more on why I think dreams and hallucinations shouldn’t be off-limits for fiction writers, place-based writing as a response to environmental crisis, the challenge of endings, some of my favorite writers, and more. Enjoy!
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!
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.
New interview up at Fiction Writers Review
May 8, 2017 § Leave a comment
Really enjoyed this wide-ranging conversation with the perceptive Art Hutchinson at Fiction Writers Review. We discussed, among other things, extreme sports, the supernatural, foreign and historical settings, pushing the boundaries of conscious perception, and why the inner landscape is something fiction can do better than any other art. Read the whole interview here!
Tim Weed 