Mirage Travel Writing Podcast
Welcome to Mirage Travel Writing Podcast, I’m your host William Barlow.
After two decades of indigent wanderings, I’m coming to you with stories, curiosities, and questions. In this first season, there will be narratives of sleeping on the streets in European capitals. There will be tales of crocodile men in remote Central African Republic and armed groups in eastern DR Congo all told through the experience of an aid worker. We will try to understand what it means to be a foreigner in clanic Palestinian society, and why not chronicle the ins and outs of a Parisian sexclub during a gangbang. Stories, all told with the tact of an anthropologist. Somewhat.
The storytelling is pulled from ten years of published and unpublished writing about the West, the Middle East, and Africa and raises questions relating to cross-cultural understanding or better yet, misunderstanding. I welcome your feedback and interpretations of stories, namely on the many oddities that come from travel across cultures.
The podcast will also feature writing from listeners. Writing that can be published anonymously. Writing of confusion or awe at the puzzle of cultures. Stories that serve no other purpose but to be told.
Mirage Travel Writing Podcast
Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and Why Write (Haiti, Palestine, California)
I’m calling as I drive through Saxony Anhalt, in eastern Germany, because I’ve drank more coffee than water and need to talk.
We've talked a lot about travel in the past, you know, in our 20s, always writing to one another with the question of where to live. From ever-changing locations, we would hand in our trip reports via email. I would attach crappy poems from Mexico, and you would send photos from a punk house in Florida, the San Francisco Bay Area, the Pacific Northwest. There was you in Asia fighting windmills. Pity we never hopped freight together.
Then in our 30s, it was not where to go, but how to live. The questions about travel had answered themselves. But we never asked why we write, why we tell stories. Since I'm plowing the highway under a lead heavy sky and the cup of coffee is overflowing, why don't we start a conversation about why we write.
And if I told you a random story, say about Haiti, Palestine, California, or France then maybe we could find an answer at the end.
Intro and outro music the South Hill Experiment, Baird, Goldwash, Chameleons. Episode music Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus and Tastes Good by Paco Moreno
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If you enjoy what you're listening to but would rather hold these stories in your hand, say while riding on public transport to mom's house or to the mirage of self-actualization through travel, you can buy a book or two at miragetravelpodcast.com
