Coming to America

A plan for September – and how you can help make it happen

The American Way by Tristan Eaton (Photograph: Joey Zanotti)

In these weeks of summer, I’ve been poring over strange maps. Maps of landscapes unfamiliar to me, yet scattered with familiar names. There are two layers to the strangeness: some of the names were cut and pasted across an ocean from familiar towns and cities – Cambridge, Northampton, Sheffield – while others are simply infused into the language most of us in Europe grew up hearing, on account of the great tide of popular culture flowing back the other way: Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, D.C.

You see, in September, I will be travelling to the United States. The last time I did this was March 2008, when I travelled to Austin for SXSW, a story for another time. Before that, I hadn’t set foot on U.S. soil since the summer of 2001. So as this trip takes shape, I realise it’s not just that I’ve forgotten most of the North American geography I once knew – it’s that I’m no longer the person who drove from Oregon to Mississippi at the end of that summer. Honestly, it feels like this will be my first visit to America as a grown-up.

The occasion for the tour is the paperback release of At Work in the Ruins. I’m travelling to bring the book and the conversations that it’s started to new places – but seeing as I haven’t been to the U.S. since before

Paul Kingsnorth

and I wrote the Dark Mountain manifesto, this will also be a long overdue chance to meet American readers, co-conspirators and internet friends of many kinds.

As with last year’s UK tour, we’re planning a series of public conversations with people whose thinking has influenced my work, and I look forward to announcing these events soon. There’s also an invitation coming to a two-day retreat in Chicago on the weekend of September 14-15th, hosted by Dr Ashley Colby of the Doomer Optimism collective. Places for that are limited, so we’ll open bookings first to paid subscribers to this Substack, in case you’ve been waiting for a reason to subscribe.

The beginnings of a plan – and asking for help

Having pored over those maps, and with an eye to minimising the amount of flying involved, we made the call to keep this trip to the northeastern corner, including a brief foray over the border into Canada.

So right now, the route we’ve sketched takes in Great Barrington, MA, Kingston, NY, Chicago, Toronto, State College, PA, Washington, D.C., Cambridge, MA, Philadelphia and New York City.

The team at my publisher, Chelsea Green, are working hard to pull this together – and we already have an amazing mix of collaborators onboard. But it seems the independent bookshops of America are baffled by a publisher that is still supporting a book more than a year after its initial publication. (Or just a little nervous about drawing a crowd and selling a decent number of copies, when the book has already been out this long.)

So as with last year’s UK tour, I’m turning to you to help us make this happen – to find partners and hosts for some of the events, to set up invitations and generally spread the word. In particular, I’d love to hear from people with connections in D.C., Cambridge and New York, as those are the events where we really need to find the right venue and local collaborators, whether that’s individuals or an organisation.

What does a good event look like on a tour like this? Well, on the UK tour, the venues were arts spaces, churches, medieval halls and subterranean bars, ranging in capacity from 40 to 170 people, and most events sold out in advance. On this tour, I’m coming on a business visa and not looking to make income from ticket sales, just to help the book itself on its way in the world. (Though I am allowed to receive honoraria for talks at universities, so any introductions along those lines would be very welcome.) Generally, I’d be enthusiastic to work with local partners who feel aligned with my work and who can make some money for their own organisations or activities from ticket and book sales by putting on an event.

Beyond that, I’m going to need help spreading the word, connecting up the conversations and bringing people together around the search for the work that makes sense on the far side of the failure of the promises of modernity: the shapeshifting work of making refuge and sanctuary, regrowing a living culture, a close-to-the-ground culture, grounded in practices of hospitality and conviviality, rather than grand visions of progress.

To violate the art of living’s maxim

Needless to say, I’m alive to the irony of boarding a plane to cross an ocean and make some kind of whistle-stop tour to talk about these things, and that’s before we get to the carbon emissions involved. Maybe I’ll do this once and then come to my senses, maybe it turns out to be part of what I’m called to in this next chapter: I honestly don’t know, right now.

As I sit with these uneasy ironies, what comes back to me is a line from Ivan Illich:

Only the gratuitous commitment of friends can enable me to practise the asceticism required for modern near-paradoxes: as that of renouncing systems analysis while typing on my Toshiba.

And then I think again of the story of Illich’s oldest friend, Lee Hoinacki, receiving an invitation to travel to Mexico to help him with the preparation of a book. The time had been when these two men crisscrossed the world by airplane, year after year, but that season of their lives was gone. The airport experience had become “more painful, more disorienting”. Hoinacki remembers a line from Wendell Berry – “To get back before dark/is the art of going” – and wonders if there could be any grounds on which to “violate the art of living’s maxim, ‘home before dark’?” Yes, he answers, there is one: friendship could be the one good reason to travel farther than you can get back by nightfall.

There’s excitement at the prospect of this September journey, I’ll grant you, but also a good deal of unease. The pull of home and family is strong in this season of life. If I’m prepared to pick up, nonetheless, and put myself on the road again, then whatever it might say on my visa, the best account I can give of why I’m going is the one that Hoinacki lands on: I trust that I am travelling to a land of found friends.’

And so I put myself in your hands, trusting that three or four or five of you who are reading this will turn out to know the people – or even be the people – to bring together those events in D.C., Cambridge and New York, or get involved elsewhere along the way.

Thanks for reading, all of you, and for all the ways you’ve supported me and my writing over these past years.

DH

PS – if you’re reading this in your inbox, you can hit reply and write straight back to me – and otherwise, you can get through to me at dougaldhine@gmail.com.