Back in my magazine editing days, we received a story pitch from a photographer who planned to fly atop the entire route of the proposed Gateway pipeline, from Alberta to the British Columbia coast. The photographer, a Canadian member of the International League of Conservation Photographers, wanted to document the landscape that would have been impacted by…
Next month, I’m taking another step in my campaign to fuse the worlds of walking and writing. I am becoming the world’s first treadmill desk writer-in-residence! How does one become a treadmill desk writer-in-residence, you might ask? And: what on earth does it mean? Well, read on and I’ll attempt to answer those questions. But the…
In the lead-up to the release of Born to Walk on April 1, I’m going to be tweeting the video to a different walking song each day. These will be posted in no particular order; there won’t be a No. 1. But like “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by Scottish band The Proclaimers, who are not…
There’s a new book on my nightstand: A Philosophy of Walking, by French philosophy professor Frédéric Gros (that’s him in the photo, looking like what you’d expect a French philosophy professor to look like). The book explores why so many writers and philosophers, from Nietzsche and Kant to Kerouac, relied on walking as a pathway toward…
It’s 2053. Nobody walks anymore. They’re all inside. Watching their “viewing screens.” Except, in this Ray Bradbury short story, a man named Leonard Mead. And this is what happens:
Anybody who has read it may still be chilled by it: The Long Walk, by Richard Backman (a.k.a. Stephen King). The 1979 novel, the first King wrote, is about a life-and-death walking contest in America’s dystopian future. Kind of like a cross between Rollerball and The Road. King is known to be a prolific writer,…
Reading this book about walking 6,000 miles in New York. It’s fascinating. Spend enough time walking around a city and you see stuff like this, a car with cornrows.
Brooklyn-based art collective Elastic City makes “its audience active participants in an ongoing poetic exchange with the places we live in and visit.” How? By commissioning artists to create their own walks. As the group’s website explains, “These walks are participatory and may rely on sensory-based techniques, the creation of new folk rituals and/or other artist-derived…
born to walk (and paddleboard) 