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The Long Way Home
Author: Timothy A. Herwig
Imprint: Triarchy Press
Extent: 178pp. Paperback
Size: 15.2 x 23 cm
ISBN: 978-1-913743-60-4
List Price: £14.00 / $17.50  
​Title published October 2022

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pdf ISBN: 978-1-913743-62-8 ​
​version: bookmarked pdf
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ePub ISBN: 978-1-913743-61-1
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Tags: walking, Midwest, Chicago, Minnesota, teenage sexual abuse,  trauma, psychogeography.

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About the author
A sample chapter
See the maps of this walk

See our other books on Walking

The Long Way Home
 
Timothy   A.   Herwig


"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.
As Tim Herwig says:

When I moved to Chicago from Minnesota I discovered the extent to which landscape informed my identity. I recognized myself in a Minnesota landscape, but not in a Chicago landscape. I couldn't see myself. Like music, the landscape of the first 40 years of my life sang with my experience in Minnesota. The music of Chicago was dissonant, not harmonious. I couldn't see and I couldn't hear. I walked to Minnesota so I could create a path of intimate experience and not feel lost, to see continuity and hear harmony. 

The early European immigrants (Capitalists and Christians) decided to change the landscape so they could see themselves as they had in Europe. Ironically, this is the same landscape in which I feel most authentic. That said, what was most transformative and radical about 
walking to Minnesota was not corn and soybeans but the sky, the earth, and water. It wasn't what my ancestors had changed but what they couldn't. 

Praise for The Long Way Home

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. His first book of collected plays, sash & trim and other plays, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2014
 
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. Along the way, he rediscovers a sense of self with the help of dozens of ordinary Midwesterners who share their own trials and triumphs. 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.
– Craig Cox, author of Storefront Revolution: Food Co-ops and the Counterculture
 
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. While doing so, he recalls in vivid details the significant and life changing events of his past in this coming-of-age story. 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.
– Paul Goodnature, teacher, Humanities, Albert Lea Senior High School. 1987 Minnesota Teacher of the Year
 
Timothy Herwig illuminates the literature of walking with profound observation and self-contemplation. His curiosity about, and love of, people, land and history shines through every word. 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. The landscape, weather and individuals he meets entertain, cajole, nurture, threaten, and push him to go deeper into memories and dreams. 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. Tim's humility, honesty, trans-parency, and authenticity is deeply engaging and refreshing. You walk with him and see yourself. 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. It shines like a brilliant gem into the soul.
– Rachel Mann PhD, Sacred Activist, Social Scientist, Healer and Spiritual Teacher, rachelmannphd.com
 
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 cliché, 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. Author of Getting Out: Youth Gangs, Violence, and Positive Change
 
Tim Herwig's journey from Chicago to Minneapolis is more than a memoir of a walk across several of the United States, it is also a traversing of states of mind, the poetic sense of time, place and light, and a lyric evocation of geography and history (both cultural and personal). Reading this is to know both the man and the Midwest he clearly loves.
Loren Niemi, Storyteller / Author of What Haunts Us, winner of the 2020 Midwest Book award for ‘Sci-Fi / Fantasy / Horror / Paranormal Fiction’
 
The Long Way Home is a remarkable treasure of exquisitely crafted prose that reads like poetry. As he walks from Illinois to Minnesota, Tim Herwig describes his journey in vivid detail with glorious and highly informative descriptions of geography, history, landscapes, trees and plants, architecture, and rural life. This is also the record of a journey of coming home to the self as the author walks through childhood ghosts, an exploration of his past, and ultimately finds a new sense of place and home within.
– Catherine Pines, Ph.D., DePaul University Family and Community Services, Coordinator of Training (emeritus)