New direction …

… Rewriting is Redemption: Blue Highways’ Rich and Lonely Roads | Hazlitt. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…Heat-Moon has written an account of the second journey, the one that ultimately gave purpose to his life and work. Writing Blue Highways: The Story of How a Book Happened, published this year by University of Missouri Press, is also a travel book of sorts. It took Heat-Moon four years to write Blue Highways, and the process was more self-actualizing than any road trip could possibly be. “The greatest gift of travel,” Heat-Moon writes now, “often the very point of it—is stumbling onto untutored masters.” Writing Blue Highways is a lovely little dispatch from just such a character, a guy who willed himself to literary greatness purely through desperation and psychotic perseverance.