I am a writer, editor, teacher and mentor with a wide-ranging portfolio of published work, and a life-long interest in the American West.
I also have an abiding love of the great outdoors, in Britain and anywhere else my feet take me.
Pointing the way, inside the Arctic Circle, Norway, 2014
New book
Following the 100th Meridian from Mexico to Canada
Around the turn of the millennium I had a fancy to ride up the Hundredth Meridian from Mexico to the Canadian border. Laredo, Texas, to North Dakota.
Why did I do it? Partly because, as a (British) student of American literature and history, I wanted to see whether the 100th really did divide the lands of plentiful rainfall to the east from drier lands to the west; farmers from cattle ranchers; sodbusters from cowboys. Besides, I like an adventure, especially a road-trip. Any excuse to grab a car, point it at a big empty landscape and say goodbye to the city.
The book describes my journey through six western states: Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. I wanted to see for myself who lived out there, what they were doing, and whether the supposed divide was palpable. And because those lands were largely settled by pioneers during the great homesteading period, I wanted to see what was left of those family farms. What happened to those brave pioneers?
Along the way I stopped and talked to people. I got invited to eat, occasionally to stay the night. In the Texas Hill country I was put up in a bunkhouse and fed a huge steak cooked over a fire-pit as the stars twinkled overhead. In Kansas the weather was cold, and the ranger in charge of a historic house built by an Englishman along the Solomon river invited me to spread my sleeping-bag on the office floor. In North Dakota I met a park ranger on the banks of the Missouri river and before I knew it I was a guest in his home, eating venison he’d shot the previous fall. On the the Standing Rock reservation I sat and drank coffee with a Sioux woman who explained why half the houses I passed were owned by white folk.
Traveling was easy back then. Gas was $1.60 a gallon, a motel room under $20, a square meal maybe £5. People were relaxed. In Pierre, South Dakota, I strolled into the Capitol and met the Governor’s secretary, who apologised for his absence, ‘Because he sure woulda loved to meet you’.
Over the five thousand miles or so that I drove that spring season, I got to know something of the landscape – vast, empty, occasionally overwhelming; and its history. I met some people who were doing fine, but an awful lot who, like their businesses, their towns, their children, were struggling.
So did I ever come across a farm or ranch where that particular American Dream - of the homesteader wanting to provide for a family - had been lived to the full? I invite you to read the book and find that out for yourself.
Fifty years ago, inspired by American authors like Thoreau and Kerouac, British author Alan Wilkinson decided to drop out and write for a living.
“Writing about America, Alan Wilkinson ranks right up there with Alistair Cooke, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens and Frederick Law Olmsted. A pure pleasure to read his story, all told in his delightfully British writing style.”
An account of my six-month stay, alone, in a tumbledown hunting lodge on a cattle ranch in remote Cherry County.
“As with the best travel writing, a visitor has held up a mirror to a place I love and shown it to us more clearly than we see it ourselves.”
and other discoveries on a bike-ride across Nebraska
Ray West and his brother Luke grew up together in a monochrome post-war Britain dazzled by images from the American West.
“Compelling story & characters, a real prize winner”
Written by a nurse to her sweetheart in the trenches.
Notices from me will appear here, roughly once a week.
