Bill Truesdale

If it wasn't for Bill Truesdale's constant encouragement, I would've never thought of my zany email letter to him as a possible prose piece for House on Via Gombito: North American Women Writing Abroad (A broad!). (I had just returned from the USSR; I was abuzz, agog, as well as jet-lagged.)

Bill rejected my Peru travel piece and said—work on the letter. My flabber was ghasted. My shell was shocked. What letter? My email? So, from my emails, I drafted a train piece about traveling across the Russias. First big prose piece I'd ever tackled. Something like 10k words, it went through many drafts, and it also opened up the doorway to writing prose. And here I am, right now, writing prose....

Bill believed strongly in supporting emerging writers, and founded New Rivers Press in an old barn in 1968; Bill picked up lead poisoning from setting type as he set the first books by hand. The legacy press, with some 300 titles in print, is oldest continuously publishing press in the country. It was also the first book publisher to obtain a 501(c)3 nonprofit status, thus changing the role of small publishing forever.

So, yeah, I Bill, New Rivers Press editor extraordinaire. Bill died in 2001, after a long illness. Wherever you may be, Bill, riding that great zephyr in the sky, thanks for reading my zany eleventh-hour emails and seeing a potential story in them.

Nearly fifty women writers from North America contributed to the House on Via Gombito, an extraordinary anthology, published in 1991, long before the likes of Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, and other women traveller-writers came into the limelight. These women writers (and myself) were pioneers exploring the inner emotional landscape of travel, as well as the outer landscapes, in a genre stolidly set in a male-dominated world of heroic adventure writing.

My memoir about traveling across the USSR, Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace was reprinted in Writing the Rails: Train Adventures by the World's Best Loved Train Stories—by a subsidiary of Workman Publishers, Black Dog & Leventhal. It was a great line up (of mostly dead writers), Paul Theroux, VS Naipaul, Edith Wharton... I kept thinking they'd made a mistake including me.

Sadly the book was stood up and remaindered after 9/11. I never did get to do an author reading or book signing at Barnes & Noble. Alas, I do not have an electronic facsimile of my story, it's on the ever-growing 'to do" scan pile. It's done! Visit the page, Writing the Rails: Train Adventures.

C.W. "Bill" Truesdale

Writing the Rails: Train Adventures By the World's Best-Loved Writers

Writing the Rails: Train Adventures By the World's Best-Loved Writers 

 My 1990 travel story Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace, first published in House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad edited by Madelon Sprengnether, C.W. Truesdale, was picked up by Black Dog & Leventhal (Workman) in 2001. See my blogpost, Bill Truesdale for the backstory.

Writing the Rails: Train Adventures By the World's Best-Loved Writers  edited by Edward C. Goodman. Alas, the book was remaindered soon after it was released, right before 9/11. I never did get to do an author reading or book signing at Barnes & Noble.

Here's a link to my 1991 post. I do not have an electronic facsimile of my story. Only way to get it is to scan pages, but I've no OCR software. I may scan pages direct.  —MH, 2014 Well, it took me six years to get around to it, but the OCR of this text is now at the bottom of this post. It wasn't easy but I managed. I actually had to buy a copy of the book on eBay. Now to see if this text is the same as in House on Via Gombito. It should be as it's a direct reprint. Still missing is the original email that led to the first long draft, and various permutations before the annotated text settled into its present position. —MH 2020.

WRITING THE RAILS
Train Adventures By the World's Best-Loved Writers
Edited by Edward C. Goodman
Black Dog & Leventhal; WORKMAN Publ.

Rich and inviting, this collection of 101 train travel stories, both fact and fiction, by renowned writers from around the world and throughout history, is a feast for the armchair vagabond. The stories, essays, historic accounts, poetry, songs and other pieces that comprise this impressive anthology have been carefully selected from the widest range of sources to reflect the glories of travel by rail, from the Orient Express to the New York City subway. So many of the world's great writers have celebrated train travel, and here they are in one collection-Mary McCarthy on the Italian railways; Paul Theroux on the old Patagonia Express; Lewis Carroll from Through the Looking Glass; F. Scott Fitzgerald from Tender Is the Night; Ian Fleming, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Rudyard Kipling-by turns funny, exciting and moving, and a joy to read throughout. Whether your true love is travel, great literature or trains, you'll get lost in this eclectic and exotic compilation that extends to all parts of the globe and deep into the imaginations of our finest writers.