Upcoming travel programs: Peru & Oaxaca
October 24, 2025 § Leave a comment
Peru: Ancient Cultures, Natural Wonders. April 8-19, 2026. As some of you may know, I have a long history with Peru (scroll down for photos from some of my travel there in the early aughts) and have been planning a friends’ trip back to the country in collaboration with my friend and fellow Middlebury graduate, distinguished documentary filmmaker Amy Bucher. It’s going to be an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience! We’ll be running the trip in collaboration with the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC): here’s a link with all the details. The deposit date is coming right up on November 7, 2025. There are still a few openings, but don’t wait too long to register. We very much hope you can join us!
Oaxaca Writers’ Workshop. November 14-21, 2026. I can’t wait to return to the enchanting valley of Oaxaca! This writing workshop will feature plenty off-the-beaten track exploration of the area’s amazing artistic, archaeological, natural, and gustatory riches, and we’ll have parallel activities during the daily writing workshop for non-writer friends and significant others, such as hands-on cooking and/or Spanish classes. Stay tuned for more on this, and if you’re already interested, please send me a note and I’ll put you on the list to receive further details as they come out.
Inca Stonework
Scroll down to see some photos from my early travels to Peru, when I became especially fascinated by the spectacular ways the Inca had of working with sculpted stone. It’s really quite amazing and speaks of a relationship between nature, spirituality, and architecture that I don’t think we’ve come close to fully appreciating in our own culture. We’ll be exploring these Sacred Valley sites and many more in April 2026!
New interviews, reviews, and book roundups featuring THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT
June 20, 2025 § Leave a comment
This interview with LA-based journalist, gamer, and film buff Paul Semel was especially fun because the conversation ranged into questions of film influences, including my ideal casting choices for the main characters of THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT. Read the whole interview here.
Quick excerpt: “In terms of influence, film and TV weren’t as important as other books, but my guess is that movies like Interstellar, Contact, and Arrival sort of gave me permission to pursue a story foregrounding the kind of “big” ambitious topics I was interested in, like space-time, general relativity, and the future of humanity, while TV series like Battlestar Galactica reminded me that when the survival of the human species is an open question, it can generate high stakes and robust dramatic tension. And the popularity of the great nature documentaries, like Planet Earth, showed that the awesome spectacles of life on Earth could be intrinsically riveting for mass audiences.”
Very cool: THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT was featured in a new scifi books roundup at Transfer Orbit, a newsletter run by Vermont writer Andrew Liptak that provides regular look at the latest news within the science fiction community, featuring analysis and commentary and updates about fiction, writing, and the future of reading.
Also very cool: THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT was featured in a best beach reads roundup by The Cullman Times in Cullman, Alabama—with the article also syndicated by the Rome News-Tribune in Rome, Georgia. Making inroads in the American south!
I also loved this notably glowing review from Shannon at It Starts at Midnight.
Quick excerpt: “This is hands down one of the most thought-provoking books that I have ever read. Which is saying something, because thought-provoking books are kind of my thing . . . I have so much to say about this book, but I equally want to tell you no more. Because this is the sort of story that needs to be experienced to be appreciated.” Read the whole review here.
I enjoyed reading this thoughtful and generally positive (if at times slightly grudging ;)) review from the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Finally, I very much appreciated this review of the audiobook on Instagram from @bookboundblogger.
Quick excerpt: “I am very picky about my sci-fi books. This one hit the mark! It didn’t feel like reading a novel. It felt like witnessing a slow‑motion disaster unfold with stunning imagery and quiet heartbreak. The science felt authentic. The emotion was raw. The tension never let up. It gave geography class, climate awareness, and gut‑punch storytelling all in one, but never preachy or feeling like an info-dump. Just deeply human.” Read the whole review here.
3 top fiction reads of 2024
October 14, 2024 § Leave a comment
Last year I put together a list of three of the books I most enjoyed reading for this interesting emerging literary organization called Shepherd, which has been conceived as a competitor to Goodreads. This year’s selection was harder to narrow down, but here it is, my list of my three top reads for 2024! (Note that these are books I read in 2024, not necessarily ones that were published in 2024. I tend to read new books a year or two after they come out.)
I think it’s important for writers and readers to support organizations that are trying to get the word out about good books. For one thing, it’s a way to circumvent the powerful media channels dominated by conglomerate publishing; instead of the books they say we should be reading, why not listen to each other? Word of mouth, not well-funded marketing campaigns, after all, is a much more reliable way to find good books.
Of course anyone who loves to read is going to be relying to a major extent on the conglomerates; it’s just baked into the system. I try to buy books from small and independent presses whenever possible, but many of my favorites were put out by the Big 5 corporate imprints. And while it’s true that Goodreads is owned by the Amazon corporate empire, Goodreads and Amazon offer some of the best (and often the only) ways for relatively unknown writers to make their books discoverable to the world at large. This is why I’m pretty assiduous about rating and briefly reviewing the books I’ve read and enjoyed on these sites—and if you care about books and authors, you should too!
Still, Shepherd is a refreshing upstart, and I love what they’re doing for books and authors, so I tend to respond when they approach me to make this kind of list. Some time ago I compiled my list of the best historical novels of early colonial New England; and here are my three top fiction reads of 2023. Enjoy!
Tim Weed 