Overview

""We keep things inside, those of us who live in the Midwest. Anyone who lives out in the open where little stands between you and the horizon knows this. It’s all sky. It’s infinitely blue in summer and hammering gray in winter. So you keep your head down and your thoughts inside. Yet the landscape is haunted with memories. The memories of lives lived having kept everything inside. They seep out of us like a spring or the fog and attach themselves to objects, sounds, smells, the wind. They attach themselves to anything that can bear to take them. ​ Some of the memories we keep inside, some of them are terrible. Terrible things done to us, and terrible things we have done to others. We keep them down, and we run. We run so far and so deep that memory becomes forgetfulness. We’re lost. We’re lost to the living of life."" So begins The Long Way Home - a closely observed account of the author's actual 5-week, 500-mile walk from Chicago to Minneapolis and parallel journey through the memories of his traumatic and painful life as a young man. His meetings with people and places along the journey open up the history, culture and experience of this part of the Midwest in a way that will captivate any interested reader.

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9781913743604

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Reviews

The Long Way Home is an authentically and beautifully rendered memoir of the internal trauma that results when adult mentors sexually violate the vulnerable youth who trust them. More importantly, it is the story of what healing is like - a literal and metaphoric journey that ends with wholeness, but a wholeness imbued with a wisdom that comes from stepping into what is most feared. It is not a book about winning over or vanquishing the past - it is a book about accepting that the past can't be undone, while showing that it can be disarmed and embraced, gingerly, in our own journeys. The Long Way Home is about the potential that comes when we trust our bodies to heal our minds and hearts and is an example of the gifts that come from reflecting deeply and honestly on our experiences of the world around us. Without sentimentality or cliche, The Long Way Home invites us to imagine our own journeys to being at peace with ourselves and with the world as it is. --Keith Morton, Professor of Public and Community Services at Providence College The Long Way Home gives new meaning to Emerson's words: It's not the destination, it's the journey. As Herwig opens to the land during his quest for that elusive state of being known as home, he opens to memories of childhood, family, and to the histories of all the idiosyncratic people he encounters along the way. His photographic journey transcends time and place in the best possible way, and ultimately leads him right back where he belongs. --Djola Branner Professor of Theater, George Mason University

Author Information

Tim Herwig has been a writer, performer, teacher, and student of literature and the humanities for his adult life. As a performing artist, he was interested in how a poet or writer transforms an image into metaphor. He imagined a physical space or moment of time between the formation of a metaphor and when a writer or poet writes it on a piece of paper or taps it out on a keyboard. He worked for many years in the social/economic justice field of community development, both for a bank and a federal regulatory agency.

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