Now out: the e-book of Hard Travel, a short story collection and my first book. The seven stories are set in Guatemala, the Copper Canyon of Mexico, and at a bluegrass festival in North Carolina. Also in the old CBC Radio building on Jarvis Street in Toronto, where rumour had it, the pair of pants hanging on a second-floor coat hook pulled down a middle management salary.

“Hard Travel is a book about change,” according to the Vancouver Sun, “shifts in the axis of understanding that alter perception irrevocably. Each story builds to a crystalline moment of realization that heralds a new phase of life.”

You can download the collection here. And I want to highlight the lovely new cover by Anna May Henry, a very talented artist and illustrator whom I’m proud to say is my daughter-in-law.

I wrote the stories while I was living in Mexico City from 1985 to 1988. My husband Paul Knox was the Toronto Globe and Mail correspondent assigned to Latin America, and we arrived in the capital just two days before a pair of massive earthquakes killed at least 10,000 people. No one really knows how many, even now.

We were still staying in a hotel when the quakes occurred. The first was early enough in the morning that we were still in bed, and the bed started walking across the floor. When it stopped, we dressed our two-year-old son and went out to see what had happened, coming across a high rise building with the floors pancaked together just up the street. 

I turned back to the hotel and Paul got to work. Because communications were down, he flew to Texas to file his first story, and was in the air returning to Mexico when the second quake occurred. He knew this from listening to FM radio, but didn’t tell the anxious passengers on the flight why the plane was turning back to Houston. 

I was giving our son a bath at the time in a small amount of water in the deep tub. Even so, the water slopped out onto the floor. That time, I knew enough to be scared. When I ran out to see what was happening, wet child in my arms, I found a big crack had opened in wall of the hotel lobby. Yet we were lucky and nothing happened to us, or to the house we had rented. We were able to move in a few days later and lived there for three years. 

I say this to give context to the life-changing events that occur in these stories. Also to the travel. When I re-read the stories more than thirty years later, I see places we went to during our time in Mexico and a little before then. We visited Guatemala shortly after a young teacher was murdered outside the town of Panajachel, took a trip through the Copper Canyon, crossing paths with a guided tour, drove from Toronto to a bluegrass festival in North Carolina and studied Spanish at a language school in Cuernavaca in the weeks before the earthquakes. 

The house described in The Way We Live Now was one my husband and I moved into not long before we left Toronto for Latin America, and the ratty student house described in Merle-oh! was one I shared when I went to university in Vancouver, complete with fossilized cat guano behind the furnace. The old CBC Radio building is pretty accurately described in The Night Watchman, and the show I worked on, As It Happens, had a pet tarantula named Malvina. Thieves dressed in moving company clothes did in fact steal a grand piano from the building. Documentary producers stood on the fire escape recording their scripts against the sounds of night in the city, and a neighbour objected loudly. 

Places speak to me. Yet the characters and their stories are completely fictional. Often writers’ early short stories and first novels are heavily autobiographical coming-of-age stories with someone like themselves as the central character. I was a beginning writer when I wrote Hard Travel, having published only a few short stories in literary magazines and three in an anthology, Coming Attractions. But I didn’t find myself as interesting as the places I visited and the types of people I met, so I’m not in this book, not explicitly. 

I say “types,” because I have always found the best characters emerge when I run across a couple of people who strike me as similar, setting off reverberations. These can’t be people I know well or the writing becomes journalism. They’re people I meet briefly—even glimpse—who strike me because of a physical trait or the way they move; maybe an expression on their faces. Mary Ellen, from Mary Ellen Among the Tarahumara, moves around something like two or three doctors I saw in Mexico and Toronto, although I have her growing up on the same street in suburban Vancouver where I lived as a child. If you’re lucky when you’re writing, the characters stop reminding you of anyone and take on their own identity. 

The exception is the character of Merle in Merle-oh! I knew a Black draft resister who was a little like Merle. I didn’t know him at all well, but he was a remarkable person, and I’ve often thought about him since. 

The discussion of white writers like myself representing characters from different backgrounds was already going on while I was writing this book. A couple of Black friends were kind enough to read Merle-oh! and tell me it was all right. They also told me they were glad I didn’t try to write scenes between Merle and other Black characters, pointing out that they talked differently with their Black families and friends than they did with white folks like me. I knew that, having heard Black friends speaking to others when they’d forgotten I was there. I knew it would be presumptuous to try to write that, and I never have. 

A Mexican friend read the stories set in Mexico, and the one set in Guatemala. One of my Black friends who read Merle-oh! is a doctor and she checked up on Mary Ellen in that story, too. I’m very lucky in my friends, who indulge me by reading first drafts of my work. As I am in my husband, who is always my first editor. 

In Mexico City, a carpenter worked from the median of a main street near our house in the shade of a palm tree. He made the desk on which I still write, arriving at our house carrying it on his back, although he was a small man and the desk is six feet long. That was a long time ago, but the desk still works. I like to think the stories do, too. 

Update, 2024: My new novel, Far Creek Road, has just been released. It’s set in the same area where my fictional Mary Ellen spent her childhood, and I spent mine. You can get it here.