The Book of Wanderings” is a tale of two journeys.
There’s the physical one undertaken by Honors professor Kimberley Meyer and her college-bound daughter, Ellie, that followed the route of a Dominican friar Meyer was researching for her doctoral dissertation. But Meyer described another journey — an internal meditation on how her daughter has shaped her life — as being the motivation behind her new memoir, which will be published on March 24.
Kimberly Meyer, left, and her daughter Ellie took a pilgrimage that began in Germany and led them to the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. | Courtesy of Kimberly Meyer
The Cougar: When did you know that you wanted to write?
Kimberly Meyer: I still doubt that I’m a real writer. When I got a BA and an MA in literature, I was sure I would just teach literature courses. When I was seven months pregnant with my youngest daughter — who’s now 17 — I moved back to Houston after having been away for a while, and my mother-in-law, of all people, suggested that we take a creative writing course. It was a personal essay class, and it just sort of opened up something in me that I hadn’t known I’d been missing.
TC: Tell me a little bit about what the journey described in your memoir.
KM: Well, it sort of tells the story of two journeys. One is the journey in which my oldest daughter and I retrace this medieval pilgrimage route of a particular medieval pilgrim, this Dominican friar (Felix Fabri) whose account of his own journey I had discovered while doing some research on medieval pilgrimage for my doctoral dissertation. I became really fascinated with his account and his personality and the period in which he traveled, which was 1483; he’s traveling on this kind of hinged moment between the medieval world and the modern world.
So my daughter and I retraced that route, and that’s kind of the second journey, this more interior journey… a meditation on how that daughter came into the world, unexpectedly. I was a single mother for a few years, and her birth cut off possibilities I had envisioned for myself at that time, including travel. At the moment that we traveled, she was setting off for college herself and that kind of interior journey is a meditation on my past with her, my former self, and a kind of excavation. Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages was often a journey of healing or absolution for some sin, and I think there’s some of that in my journey, too.
TC: In your book, you cycle around the ideal life, describing it as the “bohemian-explorer-intellectual” kind of life. What is this life like?
KM: That was the life that I had envisioned for myself when I wrote that at age 22. That vision included penetrating other worlds, other cultures, moving through them, understanding them, but also some kind of intellectual life, reading and researching… At the most basic level, I didn’t want to live the ordinary life. I didn’t want to live the life that I had grown up in, suburban house with kind of narrow confines. I saw myself as being somehow engaged in the larger flow of life, and this seemed cut off when my daughter was born.
TC: In what ways did motherhood reconcile with this life?
KM: I think that I ended up taking all that energy of wanting to see the world and explore the world and funneled it into trying to raise my children in that way — to be outward-thinking — and it worked. They all love to travel. They study languages and art. They’ve traveled way more than I ever did by their time; they’ve seen way more of the world than I ever did.
Motherhood became the big adventure of my life, actually. It became a deeper and, I think, more enriching adventure to watch these little children grow and move on their own into the world. That actually became an adventure I hadn’t expected that was more rewarding, I think, than the life I had envisioned for myself in some ways. We did a lot of traveling with them in this country when they were little. We just would pack them up every summer for a couple of weeks and just head out across all parts of the country. As they started getting a little older, that’s when we started trying to travel with them outside of the country. I thought that (motherhood) was cutting things off, but it just forced a different kind of adventuring.
TC: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
KM: You should get obsessed and fall down the rabbit hole. Just throw yourself into the little thing that piques your curiosity and just keep digging, because it seems like there’s always more beneath the surface. The more that you investigate, the more that gets revealed, and then the more interesting it becomes to just let the obsession take you over.
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