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The storytelling is pulled from ten years of published and unpublished writing about the West, the Middle East, and Africa and raises questions relating to cross-cultural understanding or better yet, misunderstanding.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
The Bangui Magnetic Anomaly
The Bangui Magnetic Anomaly refers to a variation in the Earth's magnetic field centered at Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.
I wrote a story with the same name in response to a friend's question—what is a day like in the life of an aid worker in Central Africa?
The article was written, beer soaked and sunburnt on a back porch, under the cumulative effects of constant low-grade warfare. Magnetism refers to the desire to understand humanity. The anomaly was that it entailed conflict. In Bangui in 2014.
I tucked into the correct latitudes, paid for experience with sanity, managed to hold out, albeit only for a year, and bore witness to the world. But the world was gazing back. And it knew what it saw.
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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
