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 Hampshire Public Radio interview
August 4, 2017 § Leave a comment
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, 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!
The Boston Globe reviews A FIELD GUIDE TO MURDER & FLY FISHING
June 19, 2017 § Leave a comment
Very pleased about this one, obviously. In her review for The Boston Globe, Nina McLaughlin zeroes in on the collection’s sense of place: “ . . . each story deposits one definitively into a geography, of mind and map.” Read the full review here. (It’s part of a literary round-up, so you have to scroll down a bit.) Read key excerpts from all reviews to date here.
Order at IndieBound, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. A limited number of signed, first edition hardcovers are available from the fabulous Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, or you can request it from your own favorite local bookstore! (ISBN# 978-0997452877)
If you’re in the Boston area, I’ll be reading and discussing the book in tandem with my GrubStreet colleague Crystal King (Feast of Sorrow) at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, 7pm the evening of June 29. More info here.
New short fiction out in Blueline
June 12, 2017 § Leave a comment
Pleased to see my short story, “The Knife,” out in the lovely new edition of Blueline, a print-only literary magazine dedicated to the “spirit of the Adirondacks.” This is a story that’s been in the works for a long time, involving a young man from the city who moves to rural Vermont to work for an unorthodox businessman who teaches him to hunt, with troubling results.
The story does not appear in A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, so for now at least, the only way to read it is to order your own copy of Blueline (issue 38).
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.
Two new craft articles out . . . and a translation to Italian
May 12, 2017 § Leave a comment
“Classic Omniscience Revisited: Lessons for the Modern Novelist in Thackeray’s 
“A caccia del fantasma de Hemingway All’Avana,” Edizioni Sur (translated by Martina Ricciardi). (Originally “Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in Havana,” The Millions.)
A FIELD GUIDE TO MURDER & FLY FISHING reviewed by Center for Literary Publishing & Colorado Review
May 9, 2017 § Leave a comment
I’m profoundly honored by Mary Medlin’s in-depth and extremely thoughtful review of A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing at the Center for Literary Publishing. CLP’s Colorado Review is one of the first and most prestigious literary journals to have published a story from the collection (“Six Feet Under the Prairie,” way back in 2004), so it’s a source that I find particularly meaningful. And I love the review! Here’s an excerpt:
“If you seek a guide—on coming of age, lost love, temptations both resisted and surrendered to, and the need to both engage with and respect the planet—Weed’s book is a good choice. It won’t tell you which laws to obey and which to break—but it will show you, with simultaneous beauty and savagery, what will happen either way.”
Read the entire review here.
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!
A FIELD GUIDE TO MURDER & FLY FISHING excerpted at MidCurrent
April 20, 2017 § Leave a comment
Pleased to note that one of my favorite stories in the collection has been excerpted at MidCurrent. In “Keepers,” an amateur sportsman vacationing on an Atlantic resort island leaves his young family behind to go fly-fishing at the edge of the ocean and has occasion to regret it. Read the story here.
Even better, order the complete collection from IndieBound, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble — or request it at your favorite local bookstore! (ISBN# 978-0997452877)
Tim Weed 