Wayne Grady
Wayne Grady is one of Canada’s finest science writers and a Governor General’s Award–winning translator. He has authored eleven books of nonfiction, translated fourteen novels, and edited more than a dozen anthologies of short stories and creative nonfiction.
I was born in 1948 in Windsor, Ontario, across the Detroit River from Detroit, Michigan. I visited the United States often with my parents, and have visited it often since, but I had never really travelled in the States until Merilyn and I took this trip. Like many Canadians, most of what I thought I knew about America I had learned from books, newspapers, television and the movies.
I had, however, done a lot of travelling as a writer. In 1989 I spent two months in northern China researching The Dinosaur Project; in 1994 I travelled to the North Pole with a team of scientists investigating early signs of global warming, and later wrote a book about it called The Quiet Limit of the World; and in 1999 I worked on a paleontological dig in northern Patagonia in preparation for my book The Bone Museum. But the longest time I spent in the States was a one-week camping trip to Yellowstone National Park for my book on coyotes.
In my thirty years as a magazine journalist, I had also spent time in Norway and Finland, the West Indies, France and Germany, writing articles for such publications as En Route, Saturday Night, and Equinox magazines. I have edited several anthologies of travel-writing, as well as collections of nature-writing and short fiction. And if translation is a form of travel, I have spent a lot of time in the imaginary worlds of such French-language writers as Daniel Poliquin, Antonine Maillet, Yves Beauchemin, and the Haitian novelist Dany Laferrière.
Breakfast at the Exit Cafe is my first travel book, and in a sense it has brought me full circle, to a fresh examination of the America – and the person – I thought I knew as a child in Windsor.
Wayne Grady
Wayne’s CV
Merilyn Simonds
Merilyn Simonds is the author of fourteen books, including the nonfiction classic, The Convict Lover, which was nominated for a Governor General’s award, and her novel, The Holding, which was selected by the New York Times as an Editors’ Choice. She writes a weekly literary garden essay at frugalistagardener.com.
I grew up in a small town, on the fringes of Alice Munro country, where to travel meant a trip into Toronto, eighty miles away. When I was seven, my family moved to South America, where I was surrounded not by Brazilians so much as Americans—the loud and boasting, overweaningly confident expat Americans of the 1950s.
I never really travelled in the United States until this trip, although I have spent a lot of time on the road. As a child, I travelled to most countries of South America and some in the Caribbean; as the young mother of a two-year-old, I travelled around Europe in a beat-up Volkswagen van; as a journalist, I took assignments in Mexico and Guatemala, and criss-crossed my own country by car several times; and with Wayne I saw Europe in a silver convertible.
The trip through the United States started out as an odd combination of wisdom and whimsy, a way to avoid winter on the Canadian Prairies and an excuse for spending a couple of months together away from the world and its obligations. I had just finished the first draft of my second novel. I was tired of writing: I wanted to see the world, or at least, our next-door neighbour.
Merilyn Simonds
www.merilynsimonds.com
Merilyn’s CV
