Tom Montgomery Fate at MAE
Presentation and Discussion
Sunday, July 31, 2022 | Time: 2:00 PM
“In a world of shortcuts, a book that embraces the long way”
In a travel memoir that ventures from his small town upbringing to vastly different cultures around the globe, Tom Montgomery Fate comes to define “home” not as a physical location, but as a way of belonging. “Migrating birds have an internal compass that allows them to home their way back to their nesting place each spring,” he writes. “For birds, home is both verb and noun—both journey and destination.” The same is true for Fate. Whether he is bobbing in a canoe in the freezing rain with his son on a Canadian lake, praying with Lakota elders in a sweat lodge in South Dakota, or teaching English in a remote Filipino village, these are not stories of arrival. They are detours of discovery, a spiritual wayfinding through the wilderness of time and memory.
Scott Russell Sanders on The Long Way Home:
“Tom Montgomery Fate offers us a testament of devotion— to family, social justice, the unsung midwestern landscape, and the wisdom housed in books. His own book adds to that wisdom, harvesting insights from a lifetime of
inner and outer travels. Each essay is a vivid episode in his quest, a venturing out to places that test his character and mold his conscience, followed by a return home, his vision renewed. Traveling with him as readers, we may learn to see our own homeplaces afresh.”
—Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of the Imagination
Biography
Tom Montgomery Fate is a professor emeritus at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn IL, where he taught creative writing and literature courses for more than 30 years. He is the author of five other nonfiction books. The most recent is Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild (Beacon Press). A regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune, his essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, Orion, The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Riverteeth, and many others. Dozens of his essays have also aired on NPR, PRI, and Chicago Public Radio.
Essay Audio Read: https://collegevilleinstitute.org/news/a-great-plenty-video/
Date and Time
Sunday Jul 31, 2022
2:00 AM - 3:00 PM CDT
Presentation and Discussion
Sunday, July 31st
2:00 PM
Hours for MAE:
Monday - Thursday from 9 am - 5 pm
Friday from 9 am - 4:30 pm
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Fees/Admission
Free and open to the public
Contact Information
MAE, 563-652-9925
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