The nomad in us

With dad in Canada, circa 1973.

I’m teaching a seminar on space and place this semester. Great students, great texts, great fun. For me, at least. I think the students are enjoying it as well, but won’t speak for them.

Some came to the launch party for our Kickstarter project, and found some sort of connection between what I was teaching them and what I was filming. Guilty. But that’s the best way to teach a seminar. Focus on what’s most interesting to you at the time. It makes for a more involved class.

We read Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, Henri Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. All heady stuff.

Mom with our first pop-up camper (a rental, like all of them), on the way to Wyoming. Maybe 1970?

But I just keep thinking about going camping with my parents when I was a kid. I’m introducing these students to challenging theory about space and place. My parents introduced me to the open road when I was 6. We went to Yellowstone one year, the Grand Canyon the next, eastern Canada all the way out to Prince Edward Island another year. We went to Washington D.C., St. Louis, Chicago, and eventually, Ireland and England.

My parents were nomads. They turned me into one as well.

So now I’m making a movie about space, place, and Romanticism. It wouldn’t have mattered what literary field I studied. I would’ve made Beowulf in Denmark, or Camus in Algeria if I’d picked one of those periods. Maybe even Willa Cather in Nebraska. I have fond memories of that place.

They also made me a movie freak. We watched all the classics. I can recite Casablanca. I’m pretty close with The Third Man. You don’t want to watch It’s a Wonderful Life with me if you haven’t seen it. We watched Howard Hawks, Hitchcock, tons of musicals.

The road, the screen. These have been my constant companions for decades, so it’s not at all strange that once I got to making a film, it’s about the road, and now that I’m going back on the road, I’m making a film about it.

Check out our Kickstarter, please. We’re getting there, but we’ll need help through the whole thing. Eric Trimble and I are a good team, and I’m confident you’ll like the film we’re making. But we can’t do it alone.