As a novelist, songwriter and artist, I think of traveling as the little known tenth muse.
Welcome to Writer In The World, the Wednesday section of Aimee Liu’s MFA Lore. This curated collection of reclaimed essays on the writing life and new videos of Writers in Conversation is produced by MFA faculty and alumni.
Aimee’s MFA Core essays on the craft and business of creative writing drop each Saturday. And her free Metaphortography Writing Prompts post every other Monday.
As an MFA Lore subscriber you can join our community and elect to receive some or all of these sections each week.
The Writer’s Road Trip*
Descended at least culturally if not genetically from the ranks of our most exulted literary road warriors – writers like John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey – my wife Karen Walasek and I have exercised and exorcised our wanderlust cyclically throughout our marriage. There have been many, many journeys punctuated by periods of growing and transplanting roots. In the first twenty years of our marriage we lived in sixty different homes. We moved so often that family and friends were annoyed at having to repeatedly revise their address books. Banana boxes housed our possessions during those tempestuous early years.
We drove east, north, south and west, crossing the continental United States at least fourteen times. Most of these journeys were made by car, though a few began with planes or trains, and there was one drive-away rental car that we wrecked in Zanesville, Ohio, during a snowstorm. We hitched home from Tucson to New Jersey for Christmas one year and got stuck on a milk run Greyhound from Pecos, Texas which became the scenic backdrop for my novel, Jam. Talk about long, strange trips.
As a novelist, songwriter and artist, I think of traveling as the little known tenth muse. I call her Varvara, or Βαρβαρα if you are Greek. Varvara delights in our discovery of ourselves through the strangeness of others. She coaxes and teases, leading by a trail of the tiniest breadcrumbs, whispering in her raspy alto. Her song is like the tug of the stars on my heart.
Most writers have used prompts. I assign timed ones to my students as a way to bypass the censor and get down to the deep stuff. A month long road trip is a bit like immersing your whole body in a writing prompt. Motion occupies the conscious mind and lets your creative self – wander – absorbing the peoplescape. All you have to do is copy down your impressions.
We began referring to these trips as vision quests after our “vacation” to New Mexico in the early 1990s took a surreal detour from the normal planned family excursion. Karen was about to attend her first Goddard undergraduate residency as we set off from our home in eastern Pennsylvania during the hottest part of summer toward the Southwest, bisecting Tennessee on Interstate 40. Our favorite movie at that time was The Milagro Bean Field War, Robert Redford’s 1988 film version of John Nichol’s novel. The movie became a template for our trip as we wandered around New Mexico in search of Joe’s bean field. It was a sweaty trial, six of us pressed into an overheating Volvo wagon. We didn’t know that the town they used in the film was chosen more for aesthetics than fact (the novel was a fictionalization of a real water rights war) or that plastic bean plants were driven into the dry soil for the filming. Ruby Archuleta’s goad to Charley Bloom, the reluctant editor of Milagro’s alternative paper La Voz, surfaced as commentary on the deficiencies of our preparation: the air conditioning “wasn’t up to it.” The voice of our muse, Varvara, narrated the inner landscape as the sun purified us.
We didn’t plan it, but a member of Karen’s Goddard cohort lived at the mouth of the road to our primitive campsite. She prepared Anasazi beans, brown rice and corn bread, a gift that connected our modern family to the indigenous cliff dwellers of an ancient land. Looking out her kitchen window at the neighboring straw bale adobe buildings across the fields, she explained that Joe’s actual bean field had grown right there, next to the Pilar Yacht Club, a whitewater rafting outfit. Back then we were surprised, called it serendipity (which is another favorite movie.) These days we know it was part of Varvara’s plan.
Road trips have always punctuated the geographically stable stretches of our marriage. It’s a cycle independent of season. We grind through our daily lives, making small headway in our various endeavors when the tumblers unexpectedly align, opening our sights to new possibilities. Once again, that lock has fallen open.
We bought a new/old SUV and a DSLR camera this summer. We will journey across the north to Vermont through Canada, diagonally dissect the southeast to visit our farm in Tennessee and then power on to Prescott, Arizona via Interstate 40, retracing our earlier journey through Taos. We plan to return home to Oregon along the coast of sun parched California.
This road trip promises to braid new stories with the journeys and vision quests of the past four decades. Varvara is whispering themes of resistance, indigenous identity, and the impulse to decolonize as we head out to embrace the country’s changing narratives, both dominant and otherwise. It is going to be a trip. We even bought a mini refrigerator and a blender for the car with plans to make yogurt and sprouts on the road. Maybe kombucha, too!
Most importantly, we are journeying with our senses and writing muscles tuned. As the fabric of the land and American psyche impresses itself upon us, we are hopeful she will feed us with wonder and possibilities for a more resilient future.
R. K. Hillhouse is a derivative of Hillhouse Farms, a former writer’s retreat turned biodiverse sustainable farm in support of the fifty-year interdisciplinary partnership of Ron Heacock MA, MFA, & Karen Walasek, PhD. After raising a family, they have spent decades on farm, in the tech world and in academia in support of the information imbedded in writing of the Interface series. Interface Book 1 and 2, are available from Amazon HERE.
Save the Date!
Tuesday, July 21 at 10am PT
Well Published! Live with
Jennifer Acker, Founder of
The Common Literary Magazine
We’ll be talking about the creation of a world-class literary magazine and Jennifer’s latest novel, Surrender, which Richard Russo calls “splendid…vividly drawn characters…a richly rendered place…and the kinds of impossible choices that the real world too often offers all of us.”
*Originally published in The Writer in the World, July 15, 2015.
 | A guest post by
|
Really fun introduction to your “trip”, Ron. Your experience of regularly uprooting and reviving your humanity through movement and moving encounters resonates strongly with me. We have a sailboat and are selling our house to move aboard, which we also did for covid year two. Like you two, we explore for the expansion of perspective, for the freedom of being unbound, and in the approximate words of the immortal David Cassady, pile our battered suitcases on the sidewalk again; we have longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
I'm off to Kenya soon and hope that my Vavara is along for the journey!