patlo's Reviews (1.32k)

Some books about pilgrimage are guidebooks to the travel aspect, and most are focused on the spiritual and transformative aspects.

In Waymarkers, Mary DeJong has written a wise workbook that encourages interaction before, during and after your journey to Iona, sprinkled with poetry, wise quotes, prayers and other helpful references - alongside just enough travel information to help you on the journey but not so much that you will not feel the wonder and surprise of your new experience.

This wee book will be in my bag as I'm preparing for my next Iona pilgrimage, as well as with me when I leave and close at hand when I return home...

A well balanced reflection on pilgrimage, Christian faith and the Camino - without being yet another travel memoir. The author's reflections on pilgrimage vs travel are quite helpful, and complement those by Phil Cousineau in his similar work.

This text pairs well with the new documentary Walking the Camino - which I now need to go see again after finishing this book.

This will stay on my growing shelf of pilgrimage materials. I also need to go read more from the author, as his Mennonite theological perspectives were well communicated (and gently so) in this story, so well so that I want more direct experience of his other work.

I suppose I started reading this expecting that I would learn better how to tell stories in my own journal, which for the past few years I've kept more frequently than ever before. That is not this book's goal. Instead, think of it as a writer's resource: How can you plumb the depths of your own (or others') journals for writing fragments, sources, memories, senses? And how can those things find their way into your writing, whether as memoir, poetry, short stories, creative nonfiction? Where are there connections and themes in your life? How can you discover yourself in a way that can best be written about?

I will say that this is one of the most unique books-about-writing that I've read. It's also the one that has unblocked my own journaling, helping me to see beyond the factual record and whining about the things I desire but am not near, helping me to see the self that's under those themes and living more than those limitations might suggest.

The other curiosity here reminds me of a short story. Friends of mine are in a local indie band. One of their housemates has a habit of going to second hand stores and looking at the tape recorders and answering machines, and stealing the tapes from them. Those tapes he then either publishes to a blog, or snippets find their way into recorded music as 'found audio'. This book and that odd story have me curious to discover old journals at garage sales. And it has me asking around my family to see where my grandparents' journals have gone to after their deaths. I think they only recorded weather details, but what if there's more? What if my grandma secretly wrote about the challenge of keeping a marriage together through my grandpa's alcoholism and my dad and uncle's teenage rebellions? Or did either of them write about those horrible years when my dad - their youngest son - was diagnosed with the cancer that killed him before he turned fifty? Dad journaled some of that time. Did anybody else?

An excellent guide to the mechanics of good nonfiction story writing. Examples are from a newspaper journalism perspective, and something feels slightly dated but I can't put my finger on why, but the details are very helpful.

I really enjoyed Whyte's commentary and recitation of his own poetry and that of others. It's a bit rambling in nature, hard to follow his structure. But the reflections on becoming your true self and doing work that you can be wholehearted about, those were fantastic. So was the elegy for his Welsh friend. As if I didn't already know that I just need to read Whyte's entire collection, I'm more convinced now.

Two things were slightly annoying:

1. The way Whyte recites poetry includes this odd, distracting habit of repeating phrases frequently. He does it so that you really grasp the significance of the line, but the pacing and space is all messed up.
2. The track breaks on the CD are in strange places. I haven't looked closely, but maybe they're just equally timed. But they're not placed between themes, paragraphs, poems, whatever. To find something you have to track change and just fast forward or rewind, or maybe listen to the track. If you want to queue up a specific thought, good luck.

Those are minor nitpicks in the end. I'll listen to this CD many times over.