Description
Join us on Tuesday, July 15 at 7pm for an intimate Q&A with writer, editor, and athlete Nicholas Triolo, whose new book The Way Around has been hailed as a “beautiful, intricate rebuke to our obsession with linearity and outcome” (Robert MacFarlane).
Raised in a family of elite athletes—and in a culture obsessed with goals, grit, and linear achievement—Nicholas Triolo set out on a solo circumnavigation of the globe, seeking something beyond the finish line. In Kathmandu, he encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around sacred sites or objects. Captivated, Triolo undertook three transformative walks of his own: around Tibet’s sacred Mount Kailash, through the poet-haunted trails of Mount Tamalpais, and, finally, encircling Montana’s Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in the United States. The Way Around is a record of these journeys, a transcendent meditation on movement, meaning, and the entanglement between inner and outer landscapes.
This is a chance to hear from a truly singular voice—brilliant, grounded, rising fast—and to ask your own questions about writing, wandering, and what it means to ‘go nowhere’ in a world obsessed with achievement.
Don’t miss this opportunity to spend an evening with a writer whose path is anything but ordinary!
Tickets are free but please RSVP here as spots are limited. We’ll have books on hand for purchase and signing.
More about Upstart & Crow:
Upstart & Crow is a not-for-profit creative studio and literary incubator that champions writers, readers and stories, and the role they play in shaping our lives. We develop original programs, support artists and revel in creative projects focused on Literature In Translation / Climate Solutions / Poetry / Civic Dialogue / Community & Skills Building … all with the aim of elevating the role of literature and storytelling in our lives. Find us on Granville Island, Gibsons and online at upstartandcrow.com.
Accessibility:
The main studio of our shop is accessible for folks with mobility aids. There is a washroom on the main floor available for attendees.
Questions: hello[at]upstartandcrow.com.
The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere
Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was imbued with a particularly acute form of our intensely goal-oriented culture. “Do the reps,” he internalized. “Commit to the work. Grind for your dreams.” Shortly after graduating from college, he embarked on a solo circumnavigation of the globe. And then after returning to the States, he threw himself into ultrarunning, all to combat a deepening discontent.
While traveling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object—a kind of “ritualized remembering” birthed by place. Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. First, he completes the sacred thirty-two-mile revolution around Tibet’s Mount Kailash, in search of a cultural counter to Western linearity. Then, following his mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer, he returns home to California and takes part in an annual circuit of Mount Tamalpais, tracing a route made famous by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And then finally, he meets up with a quirky hydrogeologist in Butte, Montana, and joins his walk around the Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in the country.
At once uncommonly humble and thrillingly transcendent, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer landscapes, The Way Around models what it means to experience a true revolution of heart and home—for the flourishing of all.
