A Life in Travel
by Elizabeth J. Haynes
THISTLEDOWN PRESS
2025/$24.95/204 pp.
Elizabeth J. Haynes is an off-the-beaten-path traveller, speech pathologist and writer who has published two books of fiction prior to this first foray into personal essays. Despite providing the book’s title and section headings and being pictured on the cover, “food” makes only occasional cameo appearances in the essays, which relate Haynes’s travel experiences, life and relationships across continents and decades but are not easily captured by any unifying theme.
The book’s opening chapters offer perfectly pruned portraits of the author’s octogenarian parents as she tenderly observes their failing bodies and draws out details of their lives. The first chapter includes a transcript of a conversation with her father—a retired doctor—regarding a meningitis epidemic during which he and a colleague slept at a rural BC hospital for a month caring for sick children from a First Nations reserve. He says: “… not one child died.” “Don’t you want to say more?” Haynes asks. “No. How do you turn this thing off?”
This is what Haynes does expertly: exercises the restraint to let her father’s own phlegmatic humility tell us what we need to know about him. She consistently plucks just the right excerpts of dialogue, pertinent descriptive detail and gestures, and adds only enough carefully curated backstory to provide crisp and concise vignettes of the people who inhabit these essays.
Some essays offer straight-ahead travelogue with rich sensory detail and historical information, but Haynes’s more full-bodied and satisfying pieces commingle travelogue with meditations on people and experiences from her past. Memories of her deceased friend from Canmore hover close when she’s in Argentina thinking about Eva Perón, and memories of a past romance with an Iranian exile in Vancouver are triggered while she’s being warmly received as a volunteer speech pathologist in Armenia. While most of Haynes’s travel essays are set in Latin America, she also takes the reader to the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Armenia, Colorado, North Carolina and, hauntingly, to the ICU of a Calgary hospital when she is struck with toxic delirium.
I was sometimes surprised at the personal revelations shared about family and friends. By no means does Haynes wade into social suicide territory à la Truman Capote, and she is never exploitative or unkind, but I found myself wondering how I’d feel as an intimate of hers, having her perceptions of my strengths but also my frailties and flaws relayed to a readership. To her credit, she can also lay her own vulnerabilities bare, and—without question—the essays that convey the most raw and tender humanity are the runaway hits of this rewarding read.
Jane Kubke is a writer in Calgary.
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