Ever taken a road trip? Tell us a story about one thing that happened. Can’t think of one? Hate cars? Click that button below and share a dog (or cat) story. It’s summer and we are going to play. Winner gets a copy of a brand new book by Lauren Hough.
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I have never read John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley In Search of America, his account of a road trip he took in 1960 with his weakening heart and aging poodle, Charley. I started to read it in the late 1990s but dropped it. I still don’t know exactly why but it could be that I picked it up after immersing myself in his novels, and Steinbeck: A Life In Letters and I was just…done.
I did, however, follow every post Lauren Hough wrote in her Substack about her book, Monster of a Land: On the Road In Search of Modern America, her account of a 2023 road trip she took with her dog, Woody. I pre-ordered the book as soon as it was possible to do so. When it arrived, I inhaled it in a single weekend. We’ll talk about why in a sec.
But first, I’ll confess just how addled I’ve become. About ten days ago, I walked into Roseville Books to buy a book for a friend when I noticed a familiar stack on the “hold” shelf. All were pre-orders that I had forgotten about and, in two cases, purchased elsewhere. In addition to Monster of a Land, I found the book I’d hunted down and ordered for my husband’s birthday, Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World by Peter Keating. My husband’s birthday was in June. I’m just lucky I happened into the shop while it was still summer.
The third book? That was a copy of Michelle Collins Anderson’s The Moonshine Women which I had not only read before but had written about. It has already gone off to a friend I thought would love it.
That leaves my pristine second copy of Monster of A Land and I want it to go to a good home. Let’s try this. Click the button below and head straight to the comments. Tell me a story about a road trip you’ve taken. The definition is loose – a journey by foot, bicycle, car, truck, or on your knees – as long as it involves a road and a trip you’ve got all you need to qualify. OR, if you have not ever – as a child, adult, or whatever lies in between – taken a road trip in your life but have a story about an animal that makes you laugh, cry, or wonder, tell us a story about you and that animal. If you’ve taken a road trip with an animal, I know you have at least one story to share.
I will read all the stories in the comments and pick one. The ones that get a lot of likes and lead to conversation will tell me a lot about the ones you enjoyed the most or that resonated with you. You have until midnight on August 31 to come up with a story. I’ll draw a winner on September 1 and let you know right away and in the September 5 issue of Spark. This is open to all who comment, even non-subscribers.
As I mentioned, I’d been looking forward to this book. I loved Lauren Hough’s first book, Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing, a collection of essays that I wrote about here a few years back. I’m an unabashed fan of Hough. Both the books she has written so far show her to be one-part memoirist and one-part reporter. She reports on the world through the filter of her experience and her super-human capacity for empathy without a drop of sentimentality or sappiness. She gives the powerful a hard time but, in general, adheres to the idea that (most) people are better than we give them credit for and (all) dogs are better than people. She is funny. She is kind. She is wicked smart (as her New England relatives might put it). When she writes about family, particularly her siblings, I feel we walk common ground even though her life has been different in so many other ways than mine.
“Monster,” whose title is lifted from a Steinbeck quote, sent me back in time to a trip I’d taken with my brother over four decades ago. She captured that haunting feeling that we weren’t doing it “right.” After leaving Texas, Hough travels hundreds of miles that are not new to her along the eastern seaboard. “It’ll be better,” she says, “when I turn left. It’ll be a real road trip then.”
“Once I turned left, everything would change. Open highways. Heading towards the horizon. Going west like my bones knew was right. Just have to do this one city. See one more person, This isn’t a road trip yet. Wait’ll I turn left.”
Instead of following a certain path, the route Hough takes in this book follows her heart and her instincts. These bring her to people she knows but also to people she doesn’t. From this, we learn that whatever sparks a trip, it takes on a life of its own. The dimensions are not measured by how far or where we go, but how much attention we’re willing to pay to the people and places we find along the way.
The other Miami; “This was the part of North Beach that developers forgot…here were art deco buildings held together with the hopes and skills of the immigrants who’d staked out their claim. Down here, on any given afternoon, old men and dads displayed their hairy backs over Speedos and board shorts. The women bared their birth scares and their happily married bellies and wrapped scarves around their hips. Generations of families were surrounded by a soccer game that never seemed to end. A young guy catching a stray ball. A few tricks to show he’s still got it. He grins at his wife to make sure she saw, then dances over to her and spins her. I never saw this kind of family growing up.”
A soggy Georgia night: “I didn’t realize how dark it was until the fire died down. And then it was dark, a meaty kind of dark, like if I reached out, I’d feel it against my fingers.”
Driving through Vermont: “A low mist hung in the valley where they built Highway 9. I liked that I had to drive slow. Past those mountain towns that look less like towns and more like everything just slid down the hill. Someone pushed it all back off the road, the snow machines and old cars, the sofa and the swing set, and figured, Good enough.”
Mingling in Manhattan: “We were supposed to meet at a dog-friendly cafe. But when we got there, the place was too small and too hot and too packed with tiny, angry dogs, apartment-sized dogs, I suppose. All staring at Woody like he was a weird, corn-fed, country cousin who didn’t know how to become small. I don’t know what they were saying, but according to Woody, there were a lot of swear words and something unpleasant about his mom.”
And dogs. She writes about dogs like a person who has spent a lot of time loving them, learning from them, and being healed by them. Woody, named for Woody Guthrie, is special for all kinds of reasons but it is the way Hough talks about the dogs of her past and of her heart that sets the stage for him. He is an excellent co-pilot (warns her about the presence of wolves at one campground) and ambassador. Nothing like a dog to start a conversation which Woody does with some who found it harder to speak to Hough at first. Putting him on the cover of the book was a no-brainer. It’s one of my favorite book covers ever.
Finally, there was the van. As a subscriber to her substack Badreads, I’d already become familiar with this vehicle, a 2001 Dodge Ram van “that looked like it might belong to a retiree or a meth cook, and over the next few months would confound every mechanic who agreed to look at it, and not all of them would bother.” This was her home on and off for most of the trip, except for the layovers at friends or family or when she sprung for a hotel. Woody LOVES hotels.
If you’re looking for a road trip but aren’t going to hit the road any time soon, try this book. It will take you to some unexpected places and you’ll have fun getting there.
In the meantime: share your story about a trip, an animal or both in the comments. Hit that button below and start writing.
Here are a couple of my road trip stories. The first one was with my brother, not a dog. There were times when I think he would have preferred traveling with a dog. The second one is a six-minute clip from a story I read out loud shows me coming of age while riding in cars. The clip below features an Oldsmobile vista cruiser, five kids, a mother on the verge, a cat, two gerbils, none of whom make it to the destination unscathed. It could make anyone thinking about a road trip to the beach think twice.
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“Both my parents are avid readers, and they instilled that habit in my sister and me from a young age.
Between 2013 and 2022, I slowly drifted away from reading. Between the endless scroll of social media and binging Netflix shows, the habit I had had for years began to fade. By late 2021, I realized I needed to reclaim that quiet time before bed and I wanted to reconnect with the joy of getting lost in a story.
Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow became my turning point. It was entertaining, portrayed the creative process, and explored the world of video games, a topic I never found in any other novels. It reminded me how deeply I could invest in characters and how great stories often teach us something profound about ourselves.” - Luiza B. Campos on how Gabrielle Zevin’s novel, “Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” brought her back to the habit she never meant to break.
Right Book, Right Time
Luiza B. Campos
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Aug 15
I’m a strong believer in finding the books that speak to us even when we are not looking for them. Many of us have experienced this bit of magic that can happen to readers. Welcome to our new regular feature where bookish folks from all over weigh in on a special book that found them at exactly the right moment. You never know, this may be how you find …
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Gratefully yours,
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“Beautiful Kai Tai Lagoon [in Port Townsend, WA] with swallows swooping for their breakfast of flying bugs and a very slow woodpecker or some other other bird knocking on a nearby tree.” - from Jennifer Silva Redmond
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Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.
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