EAH: If there‘s one thing I know about you, George, it‘s that you like to travel. Are you always on the go? GM: Yes, I suppose it started my last semester at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon. I did a semester abroad in Yugoslavia, then took off for a summer on Crete, and in the fall traveled overland through Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, to India, where I lived a year before returning to the United States. I‘ve always traveled, but a few years ago I realized I wasn‘t really taking advantage of being single, and realized I had the freedom to travel whenever and wherever I wanted. Now I travel most years, recently to Tibet, China and Thailand; and in the last three years to England, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Another kind of travel I‘m into these days is motorcycle touring. A few years ago I ran into a group of bikers returning to California from the big rally up in Sturgis, South Dakota. I started thinking it must be a wild adventure to take off across open country, nothing but you, two wheels and weather. I bought a bike that same year to do a ride from Boulder down to San Diego and up the famous Highway One to San Francisco, then up to Portland, Oregon and back. What I thought would be a one-time adventure turned out to be an addiction, so now I get out there in the summers and ride the ―blue highways,‖ those two-lane, cross-country roads that have now mostly been abandoned for the interstates. It‘s a unique feeling being out on the road alone, carrying nothing but a sleeping bag and a bivouac tent, sleeping wherever I end up for the night. You really feel the landscapes are part of you, the deserts, mountains, coastal roads, and a hundred small towns. I was so amazed with the experience that I decided to write a book about it, a ―guide‖ to my experiences called The Lone Rider’s Guide to the American West. EAH: Will this work be solely non-fiction? GM: For the most part, although I‘d like to do some cross-genre things with it, including town and road histories, geology along the highways, how the West is changing, maybe even some poetry if I can work it in. Sort of a multilayered
experience of the landscape and people, through the goggles of the lone rider. I think the nature of the American West still says something to the individual, even though it‘s far different today from the past. And then it‘s really about the West as a microcosm of global changes. The more I travel, the more I sense the planet shrinking. I‘ve presented papers on portions of the book — certain rides in California, Arizona and New Mexico — but I need to bring it all together into a single focus. Strange, I‘ve long sought out the most remote places in the world, like Everest Basecamp in Tibet, the Golden Triangle in Thailand and Burma, northern Iceland, and now I find the American West has some of the loneliest and most spectacular stretches of countryside of anyplace in the world. My overseas travel habits have changed, too. I‘m more likely now to travel to some specific spot and spend my time there rather than trying to see a whole country. It‘s easy to get jaded traveling, even as a writer. You observe people and places, but are rarely part of what you observe. The traveler can be an anonymous role. A number of years ago I decided to try one of the many artist residencies, where you can go and work in a specific locale. I had in mind to get away and at the same time write, so I chose one in northern Saskatchewan, the Kenderdine Campus, on a peninsula surrounded by lakes. I thought I‘d be there with other artists, but it turned out I was alone — arrived to find an envelope with a key to a cabin and one to the kitchen. But it worked out wonderfully, as I had this beautiful shoreline place all to myself, and wrote day and night, producing about 250 pages of poetry and prose, which resulted in the book, Tree in the Wall, which came out on CD a few years ago. Recently, I‘ve attended a number of residencies in Europe. The first was Can Serrat in the Montserrat mountains outside Barcelona, near a small town called El Bruc, in an old winery refurbished as an artist retreat. It was my first residence with others, and the cross-fertilization of ideas was amazing. I found myself in constant dialogue with different kinds of artists, and ended up doing an installation with the French-Canadian conceptual artist, Mireille Perron, entitled: Complicatio/Explicatio (Folding