Not Quite Lost. Travels Without A Sense Of Direction With Roz Morris

How can you see your own country with the eyes of an outsider? How can you follow your curiosity and discover new things about a place you already know? In this interview, Roz Morris talks about finding fragments and tiny miracles while exploring England and how we can experience our own land from a new perspective, increasingly important while we can’t travel in the way we used to. Roz Morris is the author of Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction, literary novels, My Memories of a Future Life, and Lifeform Three, as well as books for writers. Show notes * The joys of discovery when traveling without direction * Seeing your own country with new eyes and following your curiosity * Finding unusual and interesting places to stay * Visiting sites out of season * How writing fiction can be inspired by travel * On using a specific notebook for travel and why that matters * Personal connections to a place You can find Roz Morris at RozMorris.org Transcript of the interview Jo: Roz Morris is the author of Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction, literary novels, My Memories of a Future Life, and Lifeform Three, as well as books for writers. Welcome, Roz. Roz. Hi, Joanna. It’s great to be here. Jo: I’m pleased to have you on the show. I want to start with the title of the book because I always know my direction. Why is it so compelling for you to be without a sense of direction? Roz: Several reasons. I’m also very focused most of the time in what I do. I go running. I ride horses. I write books. I have a lot of deadlines in my life. I’m always really focused. I’ve always got a task in mind and somewhere that I’m heading. But when I go out wandering, the kind of travels that were in this book, they were more with my mind off the hook. They were about just noticing what was around me. It’s a different state of mind. It’s like browsing. Another thing I love is junk shops, so just looking around them and finding little pieces of history just in what’s in front of me instead of having to have a goal and going somewhere. But there’s also another aspect to that part of the title, Travels Without A Sense of Direction, which is that I have no sense of direction at all. My husband, Dave, who figures strongly in the book, he’s my counterpart traveler in it. He will say things like, ‘Look, just turn south.’ I say, ‘I turn what?’ And I can’t even split the world into left and right. It’s all a different experience. I just notice odd little things when I’m in that mind zone. That was one of the things I wanted to capture, just the joy of discovery, noticing where you are, noticing what’s around you. Jo: Even before you leave, how do you decide where to go? Do you and Dave agree you’re going to go to a particular place or is it really that you head off in the car just somewhere? Roz: Yes. We do know where we’re going when we start off. Most of the tales in this book are when we have decided to go somewhere. So we decided to go and stay in a little folly in Somerset or something like that for a week. Then once we get there, we’re thinking, ‘Okay, let’s just see what’s around us’. Some travel books are written about someone who sets out to do something like walk the Pennine Way or walk across Australia or something like that. We don’t tend to do that. We just go somewhere and then see what it’s going to bring us if we just open our eyes. Jo: That’s what I like about the book. I think it’s a much more gentle travel book than a lot of the things we talk about, certainly on this show.