Hi Friends,
I am writing to you from León, where we’re taking a rest day during our walk of the Camino Francés. We both needed the rest day because we contracted COVID on the way, which has made the trip more difficult, not just because hiking 12-20 miles (19 - 32 kilometers) was made harder by sickness, but part of the experience of being on the Camino is the community and camaraderie, though we definitely did not want to ruin anyone else’s trip by infesting them, so we’ve been staying in apartments (or hotels or private rooms when apartments are not available), eating outdoors, wearing masks when inside or in close contact with others. I’m sure fellow pilgrims think of us as the “stand-offish” couple, but really, we’re trying to keep them safe. We are now at 10 days of isolation, and we’re ready to go back to meeting new people, though I have to admit, watching people come and go on the cathedral plaza from our León apartment window hasn’t been so bad.
These rest days came at a good time for me, though, because my page proofs for the new edition of my first memoir, Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail just came in, and I only have a couple weeks to review them for errors. The page proofs for a book is the last chance to make changes before the book goes to print. The new edition includes a new afterword, book club/classroom discussion questions, and photographs from the original trip, but I also made a few changes throughout and need to make sure there are no typos. The book also has a brand new cover:
The new edition will be released in October, but you can preorder it here.
Going through the manuscript again after all these years (I took the original hike in 1993 and published the memoir in 2012), has gotten me thinking about the way we preserve certain memories and let others go. For me, this book has become my memory of that trip. When we write a memoir, essay, or poem, we don’t write about every single thing that happened, because that would be boring for the reader. Instead, we choose the moments that serve the story. And of course other moments we include end up being cut in the editing process (similar, I suppose, in the way that
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