It shines like a brilliant gem into the soul. As a therapist/healer who helps people heal from trauma and find a spiritual light within nature to guide their life, I highly recommend this book. Tim's humility, honesty, trans-parency, and authenticity is deeply engaging and refreshing. He wrestles with his demons, even while Mother Nature guides and holds him in a safe space until he comes at the end of his journey to a place of peace. The landscape, weather and individuals he meets entertain, cajole, nurture, threaten, and push him to go deeper into memories and dreams. What makes this book particularly special is that as Tim journeys, he realizes that, at least in part, it is helping him heal from the trauma of teenage sexual abuse and a painful, fractured marriage. His curiosity about, and love of, people, land and history shines through every word. Timothy Herwig illuminates the literature of walking with profound observation and self-contemplation. – Paul Goodnature, teacher, Humanities, Albert Lea Senior High School. Young readers will find comfort and hope in the stories of challenge and triumph while more mature ones will find themselves reflecting on their own journeys as they, like Herwig, are inspired to discover their way home to the people they are. While doing so, he recalls in vivid details the significant and life changing events of his past in this coming-of-age story. Intensely personal, Herwig’s The Long Way Home describes the long and literal walking journey he takes as an adult to his home in Minnesota. – Craig Cox, author of Storefront Revolution: Food Co-ops and the Counterculture Part aching memoir, part meticulous travelogue, The Long Way Home is both a masterful portrait of small-town America and an inspiring tale of hard-earned redemption. Along the way, he rediscovers a sense of self with the help of dozens of ordinary Midwesterners who share their own trials and triumphs. Seeking to exorcise demons both recent and enduring, Tim Herwig set out to walk from his adopted home of Chicago into the arms of friends and family 500 miles north. His first book of collected plays, sash & trim and other plays, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2014 Professor of Theater, George Mason University. His photographic journey transcends time and place in the best possible way, and ultimately leads him right back where he belongs. 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 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. 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. We run so far and so deep that memory becomes forgetfulness. Terrible things done to us, and terrible things we have done to others. Some of the memories we keep inside, some of them are terrible. They attach themselves to anything that can bear to take them. They seep out of us like a spring or the fog and attach themselves to objects, sounds, smells, the wind. The memories of lives lived having kept everything inside. Yet the landscape is haunted with memories. So you keep your head down and your thoughts inside. It’s infinitely blue in summer and hammering gray in winter. Anyone who lives out in the open where little stands between you and the horizon knows this. "We keep things inside, those of us who live in the Midwest.
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