I’ve been reading great things from reviewers in the United States about Solito, in which the Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora recreates the journey he made at the age of nine over land and sea to join his parents in California. His parents had emigrated to the US before he turned five, and he had been living with his grandparents. The book has been featured in publications as various as The New York Times and High Country News (which covers social, political and ecological issues in the western US). But it wasn’t until I saw an interview yesterday with Zamora in the Review section of The Observer that I realised Solito was being published simultaneously in Britain (by Oneworld). 

Zamora — a graduate of the creative writing programme at New York University and a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, California — had written of his experience as a migrant in his debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied. He told Killian Fox that he had been prompted to turn to prose and write Solito by “the weight of the trauma” that he had carried since boyhood:

I began… during Donald Trump’s America, when everybody was talking about immigration. In 2017, when we had the Central American child crisis at the border, it seemed it was the first time Americans realised that there had been child migrants. It angered me that they didn’t realise it had been occurring for decades, and I was part of that.

  But he says there was joy and hope as well as hardship during his journey:

I can still taste the fish we had in Acapulco and remember how happy we were getting food from nuns in a shelter near the border. It’s moments such as these that are absent from news clippings and even other works of fiction and non-fiction about immigration.

  In retracing his journey, Zamora was helped by Francisco Cantú, who had worked as a Border Patrol agent in the areas where Zamora had crossed — a time he recalled in his own acclaimed memoir, The Line Becomes a River. Letters between the two men were included by William Atkins in his 2021 anthology for Granta of new travel writing, Should We Have Stayed At Home?; you can still read them on the Granta magazine site.

Iain Sinclair, that master in his own words of “digging into where you are”, spent half a century making London his literary turf. More recently, he’s been digging in Peru, where he and his daughter Farne retraced an ill-fated colonial expedition led by his great-grandfather, Arthur Sinclair. The Gold Machine (2021), his account of their journey on the ground and into the darkness of Britain’s imperial past, goes into paperback this week, and a feature documentary opens in cinemas. While Sinclair goes on tour with the director, Grant Gee, Farne will be releasing a podcast, In Tropical Lands, on Apple Podcasts.

The historian Imani Perry was a guest on the book review podcast of The New York Times at the weekend, talking about her new book, South To America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (Ecco). Perry, who was born in Atlanta, but moved north as a child, says she was inspired by Albert Murray’s 1971 memoir-cum-travelogue South to a Very Old Place. Her book, she says, is “about encounters… with history but also with human beings” and an attempt to understand why a southern identity is so important to her “but also centrally important to the formation of this country”.

‘View from Yaki Point’ by Gunnar Widforss. Courtesy the Gunnar Widforss Catalogue Raisonné Project

It’s over a century since the Grand Canyon was made a national park. Hard to believe that Americans once had to be encouraged to visit this natural wonder, but they did, and one of the people who did most to attract them in the early days was a Swedish watercolour painter, Gunnar Widforss. Researching a piece for last year to tie in with the anniversary (February 26, 2019), I followed the Widforss trail for Telegraph Travel. While I was in Arizona, I was lucky enough to meet Alan Petersen, who is curator of fine arts at the Museum of Northern Arizona, in Flagstaff, and who was then appealing for funds to complete a catalogue of Widforss’s works. That catalogue, which has taken him nearly 11 years of research and preparation, has now gone online; you can find it at www.gunnarwidforss.org.

Wade Davis, author of Magdalena: River of Dreams, gave a talk recently in a session organised by 5×15, which books “world-leading figures to speak to audiences to spark ideas and inspiration”. Contributors to the same session included Helen (H is for Hawk) Macdonald, talking ahout her new essay collection, Vesper Flights, and Merlin Sheldrake, whose debut, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, has been generating rave reviews.

Exploration, Wade Davis declares in a piece this week for the Financial Times, has too often been driven by a desire for personal glory and fame. The same, he reckons, is true of much travel writing. He urges us to follow the examples of Rasmussen and Herodotus, and to see “beyond the shadow of self”.

Davis has just published an account of what he calls “the Mississippi of Colombia”, Magdalena: River of Dreams (Bodley Head, £14.99), a book he was researching and writing for nearly five years. He says:

I came to know the river… in all its dimensions, in all months of the year, with every shift of the seasons, from the headwaters in the Macizo Colombiano to the sand and stones of the Caribbean shore. At no point, however, was I tempted to paddle the Magdalena from source to mouth, or to travel its length in a single journey, hitching rides perhaps on a series of barges and river boats. Admirable as such achievements might be, my goal was not to produce a study of self, an account of a personal journey; it was to write a biography of Colombia through the metaphor of the river that made possible the nation. When in doubt, an author should always get out of the way. Building a narrative around self is to travel writing what false heroics are to exploration.

Reviews of Magdalena have appeared in publications including The Guardian and The Spectator.

The excellent Oxford American magazine, which covers the South, has a new double issue exploring the theme of place. Contributions, as the editor, Eliza Borné, explains in her introduction, are “all rooted in various historic, and sometimes personal, events, yet united by connection to the four core elements” — soil, wood, water and stone. I particularly enjoyed one of the earliest pieces to go online, in which Holly Haworth writes of the places she and her dog have explored over the years: 

He was fox-red, his pelt vivid against the bare trees as we wound through them. He was a tug at my waist, pulling me down the path behind the old marble quarry, to the glinting river. I followed him deeper into the place I lived. He stopped often to put his nose to the ground, the burnished-gold leaf litter: traces of scent left by animals, made visible to me by the lines his nose drew across the earth. 

I set forth on foot following this tug of energy that urged my legs to walk. The circle of my life, small as it was, widened outward. 

  I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the issue.

Earl Swift’s Chesapeake Requiem (Dey Street) has been mentioned a few times here. It’s a superlative account of a place where the effects of climate change are already evident (at least to outsiders). That place is Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, where a 240-year-old crabbing community is going under the water. You can hear the author talk about his time there, and his book, on the latest episode of Broken Ground, a podcast dedicated to “digging up environmental stories in the [US] South”.

In this week’s free lecture from the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, Adam Weymouth talks about the 2,000-mile canoe journey he made to write his acclaimed debut, Kings of the Yukon: An Alaskan River Journey (now in Penguin paperback).

Fancy lighting out for the Amazon? You won’t need to go near an airport, never mind wear a mask. All you’ll need is a connection to YouTube and a pair of headphones. Simon McBurney’s one-man show The Encounter, which I saw at the Barbican in London in 2016, is online until May 22. I worried it would be a huge disappointment after the stage version, but I dipped in for 45 minutes and it’s astoundingly good even on a desktop in daytime. I’d forgotten how funny the preamble was, and there’s a haircut joke that now seems made for our locked-down times. I’m going to watch the whole thing again on a big screen, in a darkened room, this evening.