Martha Barron Barrett’s writings reflect her love of challenge and change. Slow Travel confronts age, gender, a modest purse, and months of world travel without tours.
Since reading Martha Barron Barrett’s Slow Travel, I’ve been reminding friends (and myself) that youth is not a prerequisite for adventure. At ages 65 and 75, Martha and Sandy pull up deep New England roots, sell their house, acquire a couple of new knees, toss their doubts and fears out the window, and make a plan. They will spend part of each year in their beloved Maine cottage and part in an exotic place. Starting with New Zealand. Why not South Africa? Why not South America? Why not Antarctica? Slow Travel shows how this intrepid couple finds the wherewithal—financially, physically, spiritually—to live with a capital L and I and V and E at a time in their lives when, let’s face it, a lot of people choose to stick close to home. Or if they travel, travel to the usual places. Nothing about Sandy and Martha’s series of adventures is usual. They break every stereotype. In the beginning, the question plagued them: Can we afford to go? In the end, it’s clear they couldn’t afford not to. Slow Travel is a fascinating read, and an inspiring one.
~Becky Rule, author and storyteller
Writers write. So when at seventy-four I knew I had to face down the big decision of What do I do with the rest of my life?, I thought I ought to keep a record of my planning. Write down the questions, how I attacked them, the input of others, speculations, changes, hard facts, and numbers.
But writers also need a frame, some sort of order. I had long been a fan of May Sarton’s journal writing–“on pulse,” she called it. I had kept a diary since age seven, but never a daily journal. I decided to give it a try and found my morning-writing style could be clipped or rambling, hard-nosed or philosophical, and the voice my own. I liked it. Much later a writer friend who was herself searching for a memoir style pronounced what I had done a Travel Memoir.
Like May Sarton, I never, except to clarify, changed what I had written, but I did a lot of deleting, especially when the idea of turning the memoir into a book gripped me. Readers need a focus, and I think I had introduced thirty characters in the first twenty pages.
As the years passed, another indispensable benefit developed quickly. The emotions and details of say, March 5, might be mushy or absent altogether from my brain, but there they were, sturdy and true, on the printed page.
Martha Barron Barrett is an artist-at-life, a gifted and wise teller of the stories that make up her life as she ages and stretches into new travel and contemplation. In her passionate and witty memoir, Slow Travel, Martha magnifies significant moments—the ordinary and the sublime—with her usual compassion, humor, and elegance.
~ Ursula Hegi, author of Stones From the River
Slow Travels by Martha Barron Barrett is available from the following sellers:
See Martha’s interview with So Much For Seniors.
Read Martha’s blog post on Frankly Penn.
Live Testimonial for Slow Travels