travelogue

Visiting Africa: A Personal Memoir and Reflection

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

I can’t remember a time when I haven’t wanted to visit Africa. I love African music, traditional and modern. I love the colourful fabrics. I would love to see the animals I’ve admired on TV and in photos as up close and personal as safely possible. I’d like to witness the power of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe and walk the desert sands of Namibia, and I’d be honoured and humbled to visit Robben Island, the brutal prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years of his life. 

A person walking along a sandy beach with a fishing spear, against a backdrop of blue sky and ocean, with the title 'Visiting Africa: A Memoir' prominently displayed.

So, when I saw that an alum of the UKing’s MFA program in creative nonfiction writing had published a book called Visiting Africa: A Memoir (Demeter Press, 2021), I jumped at the chance to read it. And I wasn’t disappointed. As a former PhD student with an interest in the slave trade, historic and modern, Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin (class of 2019) is well acquainted with his subject matter. Told in the first person and with raw honesty about his feelings as a privileged middle-class white man, this memoir is thoroughly engaging, and I’d recommend it to anyone. 

After an introduction that takes the reader from the author’s early life and the start of his interest in Africa through his public-school years, the book is written in two parts. In the first part, he describes his journey as a graduate student studying the forced migration of Africans while wrestling with personal feelings of inauthenticity and inadequacy. In the second part, he has set aside his efforts to learn about Africa from books and has embarked on a two-month journey as much into himself as through several countries in the south of the continent. His goal: to see and hear and feel the place he has worked so hard at learning about without ever really being there or immersing himself in the cultures. 

Part 2 opens with these words:

It’s May 2018, I am thirty-three years old, and I am on my way to Africa. Four years have passed since I left WITS [University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg]. Four years have passed since I left South Africa, and the African continent, without doing so many of the things I had wanted. When people asked me whether I have been to Africa, I would always pause before answering “Yes, I have.” I had walked the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town, of course, and my passport still contained my South African study visa. I had proof of a visit. Yet I wavered in responding in the affirmative because I knew the libraries and classrooms of Johannesburg and Cape Town better than those cities’ actual sites and sounds. Despite my living in Johannesburg, I spent so much time safely ensconced in my dorm room or in a library or in a classroom that Johannesburg, the real and dynamic city, seemed a thousand kilometres away. I had spent so much time reading and studying about migration in Southern Africa that I associated the word “Africa” with only words on the page, with a problem that needed fixing. I had come to experience South Africa, yet I remained as divorced from it as I had been in Toronto, Montreal, and Busan.

This trip would be different though. I have two months to explore Southern Africa—to put faces and sounds and smells to the worlds I had spent years reading and analyzing. Finally, I can step outside the book, the classroom, and the school. I can walk amid the people and their histories. I can visit their worlds. 

Through his eyes, O’Reilly-Conlin invites his readers to visit, too—to see the old slave forts and understand the suicides of captured Africans less as acts of despair than of defiance; to wander down the wrong street of a city and feel one’s own body go limp when the author is mugged; to enter a busy marketplace and hear dozens of languages representing as many proud and rich cultures; to look at sunlight streaming through bullet holes in the roof of a Rwandan church where a genocide deeply rooted in colonialism claimed forty thousand lives in minutes; to viscerally comprehend the persistent consequences of the transatlantic slave trade centuries after it ended. 

If you wish to understand racism better, confront your own privilege more deeply, or simply explore the history and current reality of life on the African continent, add this book to your reading list. 

If you enjoy travel memoirs, read the following books by MFA grads:

How to Clean a Fish and Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral

Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is, by Maryanna Gabriel

Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, by RC Shaw

For more on race and racism:

Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, by Marsha Faubert

Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion, by Tyler LeBlanc

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid

How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, by Bonnie Reichert

Walking the Camino: A Healing Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

Several years ago, I coached a client through a few drafts of a memoir. About twenty years earlier, he and his wife, always up for travel and adventure, had tried long-distance hiking. It had been disastrous: they’d done no training, they were wearing new ill-fitting boots, and their six-year-old son was with them. They abandoned their hike about halfway through. 

Book cover of 'Walking the Camino: On Earth as It Is' by Maryanna Gabriel, featuring a path leading into the horizon with silhouettes of hikers.

A few years later, both approaching milestone birthdays, they were mulling over how to celebrate and decided to give hiking another try, this time doing lots of research and physical training, and leaving their children with family. It went so well and was so fulfilling that they made it an annual tradition. 

At first, they did a few hikes in England, a hiking-friendly country. Then they decided to tackle something bigger: El Camino de Santiago, a trail for religious pilgrims that starts in the French Pyrenees and makes its way across northern Spain and Portugal to its terminus in Galicia, on the Atlantic Coast. Around 800 kilometres long, it takes thirty to forty days to complete; they broke it into three segments, which they completed over three years.

I’ve been intrigued with the idea of hiking the Camino ever since. So, Maryanna Gabriel’s (class of 2022) book, Walking the Camino: On Earth as It Is (Pottersfield Press, 2023) immediately leapt out at me. A bit adrift after the unexpected death of her mother, Gabriel was seeking a way to deal with her grief and reconnect with her inner self. She attended a talk about walking the Camino, where a stranger with whom she exchanged a few brief words leaned in and said, “Walk the Camino. You’ll know why.” 

Her travel memoir, Walking the Camino, is exactly what the title promises: a chronicle of Gabriel’s experience, from that moment at the talk, through months of preparation, and from the beginning of the famed spiritual route in the Pyrenees Mountains to its end at the Atlantic Ocean. Just a few days into the hike, she writes about a moment when she’s resting with some fellow travellers, talking about the ineffable quality of the Camino.

I lifted my head at a pause. Something unusual was happening. I was trying to understand a rushing sensation from a great depth. I examined Bjørn intently.

“May I have your permission to pray,” he asked. His blue eyes twinkled.

It was getting late, customers had departed, and the owner had disappeared. We were alone. Kris and I glanced at each other and nodded.

Intonations of sound emerged. Rumbles that seemed ancient and long forgotten. Vowels tumbled, then halted, and gathered momentum. Bjørn tossed back his head and boomed in a crescendo of resounding benediction, a cascading river that encircled us then rolled upwards into the starlight. The sound was unlike any language I had ever heard, Latin but not Latin, Hebrew but not Hebrew, Spanish but not Spanish, but seemed to contain elements of these languages. The effect was musical and the intent benevolent. It uplifted the heart and I was filled with the wonder of it. Of babies, and cinnamon toast, dragonflies on mountain lakes, of angels blowing their horns, of kisses and custard and roses, a flower dappled in sunlight and pollen and dewdrops, the laughter of children, a first candy cane, of cookies and fire crackle, the crunch of snow, the crinkle of presents, of soft knitted socks, and the snuggle of Sunday mornings. A profound peace coursed through me, as though I had been enormously blessed. Was it from this world or beyond?

The reverberations slowly died away. Had Bjørn been speaking in tongues? I roused myself. I had to ask.

“Does this happen often?”

He mumbled and looked at me shyly from beneath shaggy brows. “Sometimes.”

Beautiful, visual, lyrical writing.

Anyone I’ve spoken to who’s done the Camino comes back with similar stories of wonder and awe and peace. The writer I spoke of earlier was at a complete loss to express his feelings as he and his wife drew close to and finally reached the end point, the finish line they’d been striving toward for three years. 

I don’t know if I’ll ever walk the Camino. It seems huge, daunting. But if the kind of experience Gabriel and my writing client describe awaits along the route or at the end, maybe, just maybe, I should do it. 

Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is was the 2022 winner of the Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Other winners of this award from among the graduates of the MFA program include:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Leslie Buxton

The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons, by Suzanne Stewart

The Illogical Adventure: A Memoir of Love and Fate, by Andrew MacDuff and Mirriam Mweemba. Review coming soon.

Other books of inner exploration through travel:

How to Clean a Fish: and Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral

Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, by RC Scott

Must-Read Books from Recent Canadian Graduates: Part 2 of The List So Far

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

So many new authors on this list! (For comparison, see the first list here.) Congratulations to all the newly published authors (at least since the first list), to all the authors who were published long before I reviewed your books, I’m reading as fast as I can, and to all the authors who’ve been published that I still haven’t got to … I’m reading as fast as I can! And to anyone reading this, if I’ve missed anything, gotten any details wrong, or in some cases don’t know the year you graduated, please let me know. And the winners are:

(Edited to add: Apparently I missed quite a few books that should go on this list. I’ve added them at the top of the list so you won’t miss them. There have been several more deals but the books aren’t out yet and I’m unable to find complete information about them.)

Barone, Rina (class of 20??) Art Always Wins: The Chaotic World of Avant-garde Pioneer Al Hansen, (press and year?)

Jaffer, Taslim (class of 2022) with Omar Mouallem, Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home. Book*hug Press, 2024.

Kierans, Kim (class of 2025), Journalism for the Public Good: The Michener Awards at Fifty. Bighorn Books, 2024.

Kuzmyk, Emma (class of 2025) with Addy Strickland, This Wasn’t On the Syllabus: Stories from the Front Lines. Simon & Schuster, 2024.

McKay, Lori (class of 2020) Searching for Mayflowers: The True Story of Canada’s First Quintuplets. Nimbus Publishing, 2024.

Moore, Chris (2024) The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal. HarperCollins (Canada), BenBella (US), August Books (UK), 2025.

Moscovitch, Philip (2019) Adventures in Bubbles and Brine: What I Learned from Nova Scotia’s Masters of Fermented Foods—Craft Beer, Cider, Cheese, Sauerkraut and More. Formac Publishing, 2019.

Simpson, Sharon J. (class of 2021) The Kelowna Story: An Okanagan History, 2nd Edition. Harbour Publishing, 2025.

John Larsen’s (Class of 2023 I think) book is not out yet–due in 2026 I think. 

Book cover of 'Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas' by Gloria Blizzard, featuring a colorful abstract background with wavy lines.
Book cover for 'Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon' by Joan Francuz, featuring an image of ancient scribes on a laptop screen.
Book cover for 'The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed' by Gwen Lamont featuring a black and white photograph of a corridor with scattered leaves.

Book cover design for 'The Fruitful City' by Helena Moncrieff, featuring colorful illustrations of leaves and flowers, with the subtitle 'The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest'.
Book cover for 'Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis' by Andrew Reeves, featuring various species of fish against a light blue background.
Book cover of 'Peace by Chocolate' by Jon Tattrie, depicting the Hadhad family by the sea, highlighting their journey from Syria to Canada.

Surfing in Nova Scotia: ‘Louisbourg or Bust’

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

When I was a little girl in the 1960s, and it would come to bedtime, I would have my radio playing quietly in my bedroom—lights off, door open. I was supposed to be going to sleep, but most evenings I’d stay up for at least an hour past my bedtime listening to the Beach Boys and dancing in the dark in my baby doll pyjamas, mastering the Jerk and the Monkey and the Twist and the Swim and the Pony. 

Book cover of 'Louisbourg or Bust' by RC Shaw featuring a bicycle with a trailer that includes a surfboard and camping gear, set against a backdrop of green trees.

I was pretty wild when I was eight years old. And of course, I wanted to be a surfer girl, just like Gidget. 

I still wish I’d learned to surf at some point, but I doubt I will now. I tried windsurfing a couple years ago and I couldn’t get my balance. So much for Gidget. 

But it sure was fun reading RC Shaw’s (class of 2017) Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast (Pottersfield Press, 2018) and imagining myself out there on the waves. I didn’t even know you could surf in Nova Scotia. My mental images of surfing are in places like California and Hawaii and Australia, where the waves get big, man. 

But apparently there’s some great surfing in Canada’s Atlantic provinces. Shaw tells us all about it in his memoir/travelogue of a trip he took for no explicable reason from his comfortable home in Cow Bay (where he lives with his wife and two little girls) up the Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore to Fort Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. He does the trip on a rickety bike towing a trailer—he calls it The Rig—carrying his camping supplies, many cans of Hungry Man Stew, a copy of Don Quixote, and his surfboard, Old Yeller. 

And it is an adventure. An adventure during which he rides up way too many hills, meets an awful lot of the type of people who make Nova Scotia what it is, camps in some out-of-the-way and perpetually damp places, has many encounters with the Fog Monster, and does it with the kind of humour that leaves me imagining him standing by a campfire on a beach, in his trunks and hoodie (the uniform of the Nova Scotia surfer), sucking back a beer while telling stories and laughing. 

Back at Camp Sog, I perked up with a fresh coffee and another can of beans. The sandpiper who attacked me earlier had gathered his crew and they were going ballistic in a stand of sea grass across from the tent. They paced on stilted legs, hitting me with sharp and insistent peeps. I must have camped near their nest. The Nova Scotia Bird Society would hate me. 

“Sorry, guys,” I said. “Really, I am. I’m not here to bother you. I’ll be gone in a bit.”

More aggressive peeps — they sensed my submissiveness.

Or how about this for a picturesque description:

By the time I reached St. Peter’s, a bustling town on a bay with the same name, I was in code red bathroom mode. I scanned the storefronts for eating establishments and nearly crashed when I spotted the word CAFÉ painted on glass. Through gritted teeth and clenched muscles, I unceremoniously tipped The Rig against a brick wall and dashed for the door. It took every last ounce of strength to politely request a table — it was a sit-down, lacy tablecloth kind of café — and not sprint for the bathroom. I just made it. When I emerged into the rosy light of the warm dining room, the world had taken back its beauty.

This is a really fun book—yet another one I probably wouldn’t have picked up but for this project I’ve taken on, but I’m so glad I did. It’s quite likely I never will learn to surf—or maybe I will. Who knows? I might make it out to the West Coast of Vancouver Island for a women-only surfing school. But even if I don’t, it was fun remembering my days of dancing to the Beach Boys in my room—lights off, door open—and pretending I was Gidget. 

Here’s another travelogue:

How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral.

Here’s a book about making the world come to you:

The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students, by Jennifer Robin Wilson.

And here’s a completely different way to look at the world:

The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth about National Anthems, by David Pate.

Journey To Portugal: A Family’s Culinary Trip Through Their Heritage

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

When my two older children were small, I had a dream. We would, as a family, put our belongings in storage, take two years off work and school, and travel the world. As time passed, I reduced it to a year travelling Europe. Then it was a six-month road trip around North America. 

None of that ever happened. We did, after I’d had significant windfalls, have six weeks in Cabo San Lucas when our older kids were four and six, and a month in Costa Rica when our older two were leaving home and our youngest was 12. And since my divorce, I’ve had a month in Ireland and three weeks in Scotland. I love to travel.  

So, when I heard that Esmeralda Cabral’s (class of 2019) book, How to Clean a Fish and Other Adventures in Portugal (U of Alberta Press, 2023) was all about a five-month sabbatical she and her husband took with their family to Portugal, I was intrigued. 

Cabral, a Portuguese Canadian, spent most of her childhood in the Azores, which I can only imagine as idyllic, so the opportunity to return to the land of her birth was too good not to take advantage of. And everything she writes about it makes me jealous. As one can imagine from the title, a lot of the book focuses on food, a delicious and important part of Portuguese culture. Here’s an excerpt from a tale early in the book: 

One of my favourite things to do in Costa was to browse in the market. I often went alone in the morning, while Eric [husband] and Georgia [daughter] did their work at home. I would stop and have a coffee at the counter of one of the coffee shops on the way, and sometimes I’d have a pastel [an egg custard tart] too. I’d go to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread or a few buns [mmm, Portuguese buns], and then head to the market, where I would talk to the vendors and fulfill my need for conversation. …

At a small stand right inside the north entrance, a woman sold mostly verduras, or greens. She didn’t seem to have much to sell on any given day and what she had looked a little wilted, but I usually bought something from her—lettuce, if nothing else. She would smile and greet me as I entered the market, and I found it difficult to get past her without buying anything. I would stop to talk to her, and then the woman from the next stall (who had much better-looking produce) would join in our conversation. From her, I’d buy potatoes, kale, carrots, and whatever else looked good. ….

Farther down in the fruit stall area, there was the man who sold what I deemed to be the sweetest oranges. … The crisp, peppery smell of citrus in this part of the market often permeated my nostrils and filled my head with memories of my childhood in the Azores. … I remember looking forward to Saturday morning walks to the orchard with my father because it felt like I was going to work with him. We’d come home laden with bags of oranges and lemons and sometimes bananas too, and my mother would promptly make fruit salad. …

Past the fruit stalls was a large, partly closed-off area full of tables with fish and seafood displayed on mounds of ice. Women in oil-cloth aprons called out their catch of the day and competed for customers. I didn’t go in there very often because I felt conspicuous in my ignorance … and I was intimidated by these women, all of whom were loud and looked strong and confident. … I wasn’t yet brave enough to buy fish as I had no idea how to clean or cook most of it. … One day I’ll buy fish there, I’d think to myself. 

And of course, one day, she finally did, and the woman in the market cleaned it for her and told her how to cook it. And it turned out just right. 

The whole book is a series of memories, with picturesque descriptions of the scenery and the food and the people, many of them including food images so precise that reading made me hungry, and all of it interlaced with memories of Cabral’s childhood. It’s a gently written book that left me wanting to revisit that long-ago idea of putting my life in storage and heading out to see the world again.

Maybe one day I’ll do that. 

Other books about travel:

Winter in the City of Light: Finding Yourself in Retirement, by Sue Harper.

Walking the Camino: On Earth as It Is, Maryanna Gabriel. Review coming soon.

The Illogical Adventure: A Memoir of Love and Fate, by James MacDuff and Mirriam Mweemba. Review coming soon.

Visiting Africa: A Memoir, by Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin. Review coming soon.

Here’s a book about making the world come to you:

The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students, by Jennifer Robin Wilson.