Welcome to Notes from the Edge of the Earth
This is a long-form travel essay collection almost 20 years in the making. When I first left Canada to travel, it was clumsily and bewilderingly done. I visited a friend in Japan and another in South Korea, then found myself living in Ulsan and visiting China, Thailand, and India. Later, living in Daejeon, I started a website by this same name, which I wrote with my friend David Moscrop. We mostly just shared snippets of life in Korea, of the weirdness and the wonder, to a readership of about 11 people.
Writing those blog entries are some of my happiest memories, sitting around a coffee shop on a cold winter weekend, full of ideas and enthusiasm. There was nothing better.
Dave and I still write together and work on projects together. We met over 20 years ago at the University of Ottawa’s student newspaper, The Fulcrum. We shared a year on that paper’s editorial board, staying up late and eating bad takeout and cutting our teeth in the lowest-stakes journalistic environment. Our greatest struggle was what kind of sarcastic caption to write for an arts story, or what kind of staged photo we could come with for an album review for Rock Against Bush, protests songs for the Iraq War. (Ultimately, I found a big rock, leaned it against a shrub, snapped a photo, and we ran that.)
We went on to different types of careers in media. His can be characterized as “hugely successful.” He wrote a best-selling book about politics and writes approximately 12,000 columns for major outlets every day. My journalism career can be described as “brief.” But also exciting: I reported on refugee stories from three continents and some dozens of countries. I wrote travel stories for in-flight magazines and Canadian newspapers, and always enjoyed those the most.
Yet something about the formats—short, intended to satisfy corporate clients, aimed at a certain kind of reader (captive in an airplane seat, a business traveller in a airport lounge)—made it impossible to be honest. Invited by a luxury hotel to write a review, the review always turned out positive. Something was scratching at the back of my brain every time I filed a story, and when the dopamine hit of seeing the story in print wore off I’d always feel a little bit hollow, like I was lying to not only the readers but to myself.
And so I started writing Notes from the Edge of the Earth, again. It’s in the same spirit of the original website for the nine of you who may remember. It’s truthful. It’s long. It’s pretty funny. And, I hope, it’s in some way inspiring to any of you reading to go out and see the world, but to see it slowly and deliberately, to be confused by it, and to soak it all in.
Want to pay me to read this? You can!
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.
