show episodes
 
Welcome to Mirage Travel Writing Podcast, I’m your host William Barlow. After two decades of indigent wanderings, I’m coming to you with stories, curiosities, and questions. In this first season, there will be narratives of sleeping on the streets in European capitals. There will be tales of crocodile men in remote Central African Republic and armed groups in eastern DR Congo all told through the experience of an aid worker. We will try to understand what it means to be a foreigner in clanic ...
  continue reading
 
Loading …
show series
 
This is a confession to a breaking and entering in Germany. This is not an alibi but rather a justification for why I did it. This is a love story and a story of a golddigger. So come travel to France and Germany in an attempt to prove probate fraud. All music by Christopher Mathis from the album Woodlandsgaze. Outro by the South Hill Experiment, B…
  continue reading
 
In this episode, we rehabilitate a house in France, we get married (almost), and travel to Germany to bug my father-in-law's house. This begins a longer narrative (continued in future chapters) of battling a golddigger, a younger woman, who tried to extort money out of my girlfriend's father. So if you’re interested in German inheritance law, demen…
  continue reading
 
In this episode, we go on a vertiginous tour through the Western World, guided by one night stands, aging parents, and a lone suicide bomber. From Cape Town, Sydney, Istanbul, Athens, Sevilla, Madrid, Paris, Mexico City, to Havana we look for love in all the wrong places, we search for grit in city centers a century too late, and like a debt collec…
  continue reading
 
The Bangui Magnetic Anomaly, refers to a variation in the Earth's magnetic field centered at Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. I wrote a story with the same name in response to a friend's question—what is a day like in the life of an aid worker in Central Africa? The article was written, beer soaked and sunburnt on a back porch, …
  continue reading
 
I’m calling as I drive through Saxony Anhalt, in eastern Germany, because I’ve drank more coffee than water and need to talk. We've talked a lot about travel in the past, you know, in our 20s, always writing to one another with the question of where to live. From ever-changing locations, we would hand in our trip reports via email. I would attach c…
  continue reading
 
I once thought each culture had its neuroses, I now think each culture is a neurosis. Neurosis is defined as a particular atrophied behavior, the expression of which results from some sort of malady. Mental conditions that are not caused by organic disease, but involve symptoms of stress, such as obsessive behavior, but not a radical loss of touch …
  continue reading
 
Multiple times a day, on a whim or by demand, I sing my son the song The Wheels on the Bus. He's just turned two and loves repetition. He watches my lips as I describe the movements of wheels, wipers, and the driver as the driver says move on back. All over an idealized town, this bus drives over a dozen times a day. At any time of the day, I can r…
  continue reading
 
Travel writing is always going on about place. And travelers are forever comparing and positioning themselves between home and away. But if you travel long enough, the home you think you know will vanish in time and as you touch down in your home country or hometown, you’ll suddenly realize there's often nowhere to return to. Leave us a message or …
  continue reading
 
A blow by blow of a humanitarian aid distribution in eastern DR Congo The aid industry is selling you a lie but it’s one that’s necessary. The poignant photos on aid organization websites showing beneficiaries in Africa and Asia as grateful recipients of aid are misleading. The lie is necessary because you, the viewer might not know that Giving Thi…
  continue reading
 
In this episode we have a crash course in clanic values in Palestine when yours truly is robbed and the question of justice—formal justice or informal justice is forced upon me, the wayward traveler. Intro music by Sam Widaman, episode music by Bull of Heaven, He is Not Dead, but Sleepeth Leave us a message or question 🫠 If you enjoy what you're li…
  continue reading
 
Anyone who has ever had his or her heart shit on, enjoyed needle drugs, or rotted away in Sub-Saharan Africa might have witnessed things and could have things worthwhile to say. Worth what? I haven't the faintest idea. At least not yet. This is a story. It could be mine, or it could be yours. In all reality, it is of little significance, the Africa…
  continue reading
 
In this episode we have the politics of foreign aid as it relates to the KONY 2012 campaign told through a story about an aid worker kicking painkillers in the Central African Republic. We have crocodile men, a cameo by Celine Dion, and we turn the narrative of Central Africa as a warzone full of witch hunts on its head. Intro music by Sam Widaman,…
  continue reading
 
Herbert Marcuse's book "Eros and Civilization" proposes a non-repressive society by attempting a synthesis of the theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. He describes a utopia based on aesthetics, sensuality and play, as opposed to our current construction of civilization based on reason, production and repression. When I was a horny twenty-year-o…
  continue reading
 
When I was living in West Africa, I learned the hard way why people are poor. And why, during the International Year of Microcredit, why the clients of the microfinance institution where I interned failed to reimburse their loans, and why that was a good thing. Intro music by Sam Widaman, episode music by Christopher Mathis available on bandcamp Le…
  continue reading
 
Loading …

Quick Reference Guide