I've always loved the feeling of wandering and losing myself in a
place that's so different from anything I know. I don't know what people
are feeling, or eating, or even saying.
I wanted to write a book so my travels wouldn't evaporate
and become hazy anecdotes. Writing about my trips was almost like living
them over again.
[W]e used to tell stories on the beach at night while
drinking kava and listening to the Fijian men sing and play their guitars.
The search for paradise is a
pervasive theme in literature, and the loss of paradise is enacted over
and over again throughout history. Everyone is drawn to the myth of
paradise.
Ironically, in the process of writing my book about my travels I
somehow turned from a traveler into a writer. I still love to travel, to
talk about it and dream about it, but what really consumes me these days
isn't traveling, but writing.
I used to hitchhike everywhere, holding on to the belief
that if you're not afraid of anything, nothing bad can happen to you
because you're not attracting those dark forces. I still like to believe
that's true in theory, but I don't hitchhike anymore.
|
An interview with Laurie Gough
By Lori Houston
When you see the Southern Cross
For the first time
You understand now
Why you came this way
From the song Southern Cross, by Stephen Stills.
Author Laurie Gough wandered the world through much of her twenties, a
lone traveler in search of exotic lands and the adventures that come with
moving through them. Out of her travels comes her first book,
Kite Strings of
the Southern Cross: A Woman's Travel Odyssey.
From her gypsy home on the remote Fijian island of Tavenui, Gough spins
tales of her travels in Bali, Malaysia, New Zealand, Italy, Morocco, and
North America. While doing so she falls in love with Laudi, an island native
who draws her into his island world.
The book traverses Gough's deepening enchantment with the stunning natural
beauty of the islands. She thinks of never leaving as she embraces this
paradise found. This is the tale of a drifter alighting for awhile, drawn to
the possibility of paradise found, while stories of other journeys and
cultures mingle with the central story. Ultimately, Gough discovers that
even staying in one place evolves into yet another journey, with the
accompanying pleasures, challenges, and dangers revealing much more
about what she is truly seeking.
- Houston:
- Tell me a little about yourself, both personally and professionally.
- Gough:
- I was born in the States but I grew up in Canada. At seventeen I moved
on my own from Canada to Boulder, Colorado, to waitress and hike. I lived
in the mountains for a year before going to the University of Guelph in
Canada where I studied international development. After graduating, I
worked on a farm, then spent a year hitchhiking and working across Europe
and North Africa, followed by a winter in a Jamaican village where I lived
with a family of women. I hitchhiked to the Yukon and Northwest Territories
before graduating from teacher's college. My first teaching job -- I taught
third grade on a native reserve in Canada's sub-Arctic -- was horrendous.
But now, ten years later, I can laugh when I look back on it.
I lived in a cabin in the woods of northern Ontario to recuperate from
teaching on the native reserve. There I continued to teach school and began
to write short stories. In the early 90's, I traveled to the South
Pacific, mainly Fiji, and to Southeast Asia. I returned to Canada to work
in a group home for the mentally handicapped, teach English literature at
night school and English to Vietnamese immigrants working in a bumper factory.
Morocco was my next destination. After that I returned again to the northern
Ontario woods and began to write
Kite Strings of the
Southern Cross. My most recent travels abroad were to Sumatra,
Indonesia and, briefly, South Korea. Until recently, I've been teaching
high school English part-time and writing nature guides. I just arrived
in northern California to write, give readings for Kite Strings,
and escape the Canadian winter.
- Houston:
- What made you choose to live in Northern California?
- Gough:
- I've always dreamt of living in a place where nature overwhelms you,
yet you can still be close enough to bookstores, movies, outdoor cafes,
and Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Northern California offers these things,
although I haven't moved here officially yet. I'm just here for two
months. I'm renting this great room in a house surrounded by redwood trees.
This is so thrilling for me to be amidst such beauty. I'm one of those
people deeply affected by her natural surroundings. I also love the fact
that California is smoke-free. You can go out dancing and not be surrounded
by toxic fumes. It's wonderful.
- Houston:
- Have you always been a writer?
- Gough:
- I always loved creative writing in school. In university I took a lot
of English literature, although that wasn't my major. I wrote for the
university newspaper and then started writing for small magazines and
newspapers. I also had some stories published in a travel anthology.
- Houston:
- After reading your book, it struck me that there are at least two
kinds of travelers: tourists and wanderers. You are definitely a wanderer.
When did you first identify your wanderlust?
- Gough:
- I've always loved the feeling of wandering and losing myself in a
place that's different from anything I know, a place where I don't know
what people are feeling, or eating, or even saying. There have been places
where I haven't even known how to cross the street. It makes me feel 10 years
old again, back when everything was new. When I was a kid, my parents
would take us camping every summer. We had one of those pop-up trailers
and we'd go to a different part of North America every year. I loved
arriving at a new place, an unfamiliar landscape.
My first trip on my own was at age 16 when I went to Florida for the summer
to visit a girlfriend. To this day my mother doesn't know that that girl's
parents weren't there that summer. Later that year I went on a school trip
to Madeira and fell in love. I was hooked on the thrill of travel after
that. Nothing about it was predictable.
- Houston:
- What is it about the Southern Cross that drew you to that part of
the world?
- Gough:
- I always had a romantic idea of the Southern Cross, which probably came
from that Crosby, Stills, and Nash song. I also always wanted to live on
a tropical island. When I was young I read Margaret Mead's Coming of Age
in Samoa, and it influenced me greatly. I've always had a dreamy nature
and I crave gorgeous, jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring places where nature
overpowers all else.
- Houston:
- Why did you want to write this book? Did you keep a travel journal
and turn it into a book?
- Gough:
- I almost always kept (and still keep) some sort of travel diary,
although I hadn't planned on turning my travels into a book during my
heavy traveling years. That only came to me later when I returned and
knew I had to record what I'd seen. I wanted to write a book so my travels
wouldn't evaporate and become hazy anecdotes. Writing about my trips was
almost like living them over again.
- Houston:
- What span of time does the book cover?
- Gough:
- It covers my travels all through my twenties. It's mainly the story of
my life on Taveuni, the Fijian island where I lived, twice, over a
one-and-a-half-year period. But in that year I left Fiji for a time and
traveled to other parts of the South Pacific and also to Southeast Asia.
I describe these travels also. Other travel stories from earlier in
my life, from my early twenties, are also included. That's because in Fiji
they have a strong story-telling tradition (no TV there) and we used to
tell stories on the beach at night while drinking kava and listening to the
Fijian men sing and play their guitars. The stories I tell of my other
travels parallel the main themes of the book of my life in Fiji. It's many
stories within a story.
- Houston:
- Several times in the book you recount moments pointing to the
vastness and sometimes non-linear nature of time. Why is time such an
important theme for you?
- Gough:
- Because I'm so aware of it passing. When I travel, time stretches out
and days can feel like weeks because everything is new. Our senses are
completely absorbed with every passing detail. We're five years old
again. When I write, I'm alarmed at how fast time flies. I wrote almost
all of my book at night because that's when I work best. I would work on
a few paragraphs and think 15 minutes had gone by, but then I'd look up
at the clock and be incredulous that two hours had mysteriously passed.
I think it has something to do with using the right side of the brain for
creativity. The right side doesn't keep track of time. It's frightening.
To be absorbed in the moment when you're aware of your surroundings
makes time slow down. To be absorbed in your thoughts when you're
completely unaware of your surroundings speeds it up. That's how it works
for me anyway.
- Houston:
- What would you say are some of the other pervasive themes of Kite
Strings?
- Gough:
- One is the search for the perfect place: finding it, losing it, then
finding it again in a different way. The search for paradise is a
pervasive theme in literature, and the loss of paradise is enacted over
and over again throughout history. Everyone is drawn to the myth of
paradise. As a young traveler in my book, I learn what we probably all
know in the first place but have to find out for ourselves just to make
sure: there's no such thing as the perfect place. I go all around the
world looking for it and it's not out there. But I learn that, although
paradise may not exist on a tropical island, or in a culture as a whole,
or in a far-flung society of native woods people, it survives on the island
of the human heart, in countless immeasurable ways. This theme doesn't
come out nearly as corny-sounding in the book.
Another theme in the book is that we have a duty to follow our hearts, to
live out our dreams, to express as fully as possible who we are as
individuals. In Fiji, I encountered people who were lovely and generous
and living entirely social lives, and, on the surface, cheerful,
fulfilling lives. But, they were also terribly afraid to be themselves, to
be individuals. Individuality is impolite in many cultures. People simply
don't express diverging opinions from the group. For a North American this
is almost impossible to grasp. Our western individuality leads to all
kinds of problems, but I have also come to believe in it. As I write in
my book, "We must learn to be utterly ourselves, to follow our own deep
dreams. We're disappointing powerful forces and ourselves if we ignore
this calling. We live lies, half-truths, half-lives. Nature craves diversity,
not conformity. This is how we move forward, expand with the universe,
and how we find our way back home."
A third theme is the strange interconnection of things and people on
levels we don't normally see because we're not looking. People and places
we encounter on our life-journeys reappear throughout our lives, not
always the same people or the exact same set of circumstances, but the
same themes. I think we attract them and the reasons aren't always clear,
but if we're wise we'll learn from them and try to understand the
connections. Some people are always choosing unrequited love to feel
sadness. I don't know why anyone would, but you certainly see that. I like
looking for invisible strings linking events and people together -- like
kite strings. In my book, I'm followed everywhere by a man in Malaysia I
call the Devil. He reappears as someone else in Fiji, and as someone else
again in Italy. I learn different things from him each time.
There's also an underlying theme of life happening right here before us
and how we must open our eyes before we die. I write that "Life isn't a
prelude to something bigger. There is no prelude, just life itself, right
here. Life is progress. We're at its deep and solid core."
- Houston:
- What do you think your book achieves? What do you hope to give your
readers?
- Gough:
- When the book came out last year in Canada (under the title, Island
of the Human Heart) I had a lot of letters and e-mail messages from
travelers, especially female travelers, who told me I inspired them
to travel, especially to travel solo. But the majority of letters and
feedback I received came from writers who told me how much my writing meant
to them. Ironically, in the process of writing my book about my travels, I
somehow turned from a traveler into a writer. I still love to travel, to
talk about it and dream about it, but what really consumes me these days
isn't traveling, but writing. What I love to talk about now is writing and
literature -- what makes good writing good, what moves people, how to
describe people and situations to make them come alive. If people read my
book and are inspired and moved by its ideas and descriptions and stories,
that means the world to me.
- Houston:
- Do you have any qualms about laying bare so much about yourself in the
book?
- Gough:
- Only when it comes to my mother. As for the rest of the world, it
doesn't bother me at all. I remember when my mother proofread the
manuscript, she wanted me to change and even obliterate some scenes. After
much anxiety and deliberation, I went ahead and altered slightly the
wording of some paragraphs. It didn't change the meaning much, but enough
to make my mother happy.
- Houston:
- Are you writing now?
- Gough:
- Writing a book is all consuming. You have to put your life on hold. In
some ways it must be like being pregnant. Even when you give birth and
your book comes out, you still have to take care of it. I haven't been
able to find the time for another book yet, but I've written a few short
travel stories which I'd like to put into my next book. After that I want
to start writing novels.
- Houston:
- What are your thoughts about travel books and travel writing in
general?
- Gough:
- I'm thrilled that travel literature is now a genre unto its own. No
longer are travel narratives lost among the travel guide books in book
stores. Travel literature explores the author's inner visions as well as
the outer ones. I read travel narratives as much as I can. My favorite
travel books are about the solo traveler on a solo journey, a journey
utterly devastating and utterly joyous all at once.
- Houston:
- Where do you want to go that you haven't yet been?
- Gough:
- There are still so many places I'd like to go: India, Bhutan, Tibet,
Turkey, Ireland, and islands out in the middle of nowhere, like the
Galapagos and Easter Island, Mauritius and the Seychelles. I love islands
and am fascinated with island cultures. I also just love the feeling of
driving around new parts of North America, the rural parts and small towns,
to see the land and how people are living on it.
- Houston:
- Many times in this book you give yourself over so willingly to
"fate" and, in your quest to immerse yourself culturally, you put yourself
wholly in the hands of utter strangers. You experienced wonderful outcomes
most of the time, yet sometimes things took a very dangerous, potentially
life-threatening turn. As a woman traveling solo in a frequently violent
world, how did you -- how do you -- deal with that? Is it a matter of
gut instinct? Do you ever feel differently about it in hindsight?
- Gough:
- Absolutely. I used to hitchhike everywhere, holding on to the belief
that if you're not afraid of anything, nothing bad can happen to you
because you're not attracting those dark forces. I still like to believe
that's true in theory, but I don't hitchhike anymore. At least, I haven't
in a long time. I suppose if circumstances were right, I'd still hitchhike
with a friend and in countries where it's not dangerous. Also, yes, I
think it is a matter of gut instinct. I think I had so many positive
experiences traveling and hitchhiking on my own because I expected to have
them. I believed people were good and they were good, usually. It sounds
terribly naive, but I also believe there's truth to it. Of course, there has
to be caution and you have to know how to trust your instincts.
- Houston:
- One last question: What advice or counsel would you give first-time
wanderers hitting the road?
- Gough:
- That the world is a wondrous place and there is much to learn from it.
Talk to people and learn about their lives. Everyone has a story. If you're
feeling aimless wandering about don't fret over it, because that's part
of the experience. When you travel on your own you grow at such an
accelerated rate it's alarming, although you may not realize it at the
time. You learn about yourself. Your perspective on just about everything
changes dramatically. You come home and you're a different person. Your
world has changed. Record your impressions in a diary, take books to
read, also toilet paper. Travel light because you have to lug it all with
you everywhere you go. (I always make that mistake even after having
dragged my stupidly heavy backpack to 30 countries.) Some people are
terribly rude if you have a backpack. Ignore them. Read about where you're
going before you go. It's so much easier to have a plan and a map. Don't
think you can travel to escape your life. You take your life with you.
Travel to explore. It's one of the best things you can do while you're
here on this earth.
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