The Long Way Home: Detours and Discoveries - Paperback

by Tom Montgomery Fate (Author)

In a travel memoir that ventures from his smalltown upbringing to vastly different cultures around the globe, Tom Montgomery Fate comes to define "home" not as a physical location, but as a way of belonging. "Migrating birds have an internal compass that allows them to home their way back to their nesting place each spring," he writes. "For birds, home is both verb and noun--both journey and destination." The same is true for Fate. Whether he is bobbing in a canoe in the freezing rain with his son on a Canadian lake, praying with Lakota elders in a sweat lodge in South Dakota, or teaching English in a remote Filipino village, these are not stories of arrival. They are detours of discovery, a spiritual wayfinding through the wilderness of time and memory.

Author Biography

Tom Montgomery Fate is a professor emeritus at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn IL, where he taught creative writing and literature courses for more than 30 years. He is the author of five other nonfiction books. The most recent is Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father's Search for the Wild (Beacon Press). A regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune, his essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, Orion, The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Riverteeth, and many others. Dozens of his essays have also aired on NPR, PRI, and Chicago Public Radio.