British Isles Blog: About Writing, Traveling, and Other Such Things by Jane M. Newby

British Isles Blog: About Writing, Traveling, and Other Such Things started out as just another blog posting on a recent road trip with friends to Scotland, England’s Lake District, and Ireland, something the author does after every trip she takes; after a few pages, though, she abruptly stopped, couldn’t go on. Her detailed, immediate—as-if-you-were-there—travel writing had begun to sound ponderous, wordy, dreary to her. On impulse she decided to look at her accounts of two long-ago trips to the British Isles when she was in her twenties, to compare what she’d seen then with now, all the changes, and what she’d written then to how and what she was writing now, hoping somehow she would be spurred on to carry on with her posting. She came away semi-stunned. How fresh, light, artless, and kind of funny she’d sounded when she was young. As if she didn’t care about audience, publication, recognition. When did she lose that touch—or whatever it was she had lost?The question propelled her to continue reading, first about other trips to the Isles, then other trips in the past, reflecting on her passage before and after and during them; and the posting gradually turned into a book, her poetry, fiction, and those prior travel accounts (of picaresque romps and hitchhiking in Europe, to more mature, meditative excursions in the Chilean Patagonia and Colombia) woven through narratives of a placid childhood, how she came to write, family tragedies that subdued her, literary struggles that discouraged her, traveling without quite the same sense of wonderment and excitement. In the corners of countries and histories illuminated, the always revealing stories of untold strangers met, the eighty-six countries lived in or explored, the ten books written while also practicing law and teaching, her tumultuous but enduring attachment to writing no matter what, finally to a kind of reckoning and acceptance of who she was—curious, restless, and adventurous but with a “personality deficiency” of being unable to keep her nose to the grindstone and make a career or business out of writing—the author presents part of her own story, in all its bathos, quirkiness, and humor.