Reviews
"The Long Way Home gives new meaning to Emerson's words: It's not the destination, it's the journey. As Herwig opens to the land during his quest for that elusive state of being known as home, he opens to memories of childhood, family, and to the histories of all the idiosyncratic people he encounters along the way. His photographic journey transcends time and place in the best possible way, and ultimately leads him right back where he belongs."
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Djola Branner is Professor of Theater, George Mason University. His first book of collected plays, sash & trim and other plays, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2014.
"Seeking to exorcise demons both recent and enduring, Tim Herwig set out to walk from his adopted home of Chicago into the arms of friends and family 500 miles north. Along the way, he rediscovers a sense of self with the help of dozens of ordinary Midwesterners who share their own trials and triumphs. Part aching memoir, part meticulous travelogue, The Long Way Home offers both a masterful portrait of small-town America and an inspiring tale of hard-earned redemption."
Craig Cox, author of Storefront Revolution: Food Co-ops and the Counterculture
"Intensely personal, Herwig’s The Long Way Home describes the long and literal walking journey he takes as an adult to his home in Minnesota. While doing so, he recalls in vivid details the significant and life changing events of his past in this coming-of-age story. Young readers will find comfort and hope in the stories of challenge and triumph while more mature ones will find themselves reflecting on their own journeys as they, like Herwig, are inspired to discover their way home to the people they are."
Paul Goodnature, teacher, Humanities, Albert Lea Senior High School. 1987 Minnesota Teacher of the Year.
"Tim Herwig’s "The Long Way Home" is a poignant tale of healing. Walking over 500 miles, he returns to his childhood roots in Minnesota from his current home in Chicago. This is a journey of deep listening, embodied silence, and connecting to wholeness as he confronts his teenage sexual abuse. Sublime writing, adroitly told, of resiliency and empowerment."
John Killacky is author of because art: commentary, critique, & conversation. He served as E.D. Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, E.D. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Director Performing Arts Walker Art Center.
"The Long Way Home is a remarkable treasure of exquisitely crafted prose that reads like poetry. As he walks from Illinois to Minnesota, Tim Herwig describes his journey in vivid detail with glorious and highly informative descriptions of geography, history, landscapes, trees and plants, architecture, and rural life. This is also the record of a journey of coming home to the self as the author walks through childhood ghosts, an exploration of his past, and ultimately finds a new sense of place and home within."
Catherine Pines, Ph.D, DePaul University Family and Community Services, Coordinator of Training (emeritus).
"Tim Herwig's journey from Chicago to Minneapolis is more than a memoir of a walk across several of the United States, it is also a traversing of states of mind, the poetic sense of time, place and light, and a lyric evocation of geography and history (both cultural and personal). Reading this is to know both the man and the Midwest he clearly loves."
Loren Niemi is author of Circus Rex, A Breviary for the Lost, and many books on storytelling and performance.
"Timothy Herwig illuminates the literature of walking with profound observation and self-contemplation. His curiosity about and love of people, land and history shines through every word. As Tim journeys, he realizes that, at least in part, it is helping him heal from the trauma of teenaged sexual abuse and a painful, fractured marriage. The landscape, weather and individuals he meets entertain, cajole, nurture, and push him to go deeper into memories and dreams. He wrestles with his demons, even while Mother Nature guides and holds him in a safe space until he comes at the end of his journey to a place of peace. Tim's humility, honesty, and transparency is refreshing. You walk with him and see yourself. As a therapist/healer who helps people heal from trauma and find a spiritual light within Nature to guide their life, I highly recommend this book. It shines like a brilliant gem into the soul."
Rachel Mann PhD, Sacred Activist, Social Scientist, Healer and Spiritual Teacher, rachelmannphd.com
"Reading Tim Herwig’s "The Long Way Home" is like listening to Samuel Barber’s "Adagio for Strings". I kept tapping into sadness: his, mine, the world’s - not unlike listening to Barber’s composition. "The Long Way Home" invited me to feel these sadnesses, with the possibility of transcending them. Part of Tim’s story is his trauma and recovery from sexual abuse as a teen. He weaves this story in, as he recounts his walk from Chicago to Minneapolis in 2004. Each step down the road, encounter with people he met along the way, and observation of the land around him, informs a journey inward to peace and reconciliation."
Patrick Scully is a LGBTQIA+ theater/dance artist, playwright, teacher, activist, and choreographer. Scully's most current project is Leaves of Grass—Illuminated.
No narrative is more appealing than Tim Herwig’s prose poem The Long Way Home. Its imagery and metaphor come together comfortably, like the people, churches, and places he visits in his solo walk west from Chicago to his childhood home in rural Minnesota.
For Herwig, and the reader, his writing becomes part of an emotionally healing therapy and solace to his youthful search for meaning. The evolution of his discoveries on his walk twines the beauty of Midwestern terrain with the recounting of his violation and loss as a youth. It flows as part of a creative process that unites beauty and trauma.
Herwig’s journey brings the redemption that allows him to triumph in words and feelings his spiritual renewal. He concludes, “It does not matter that I am walking alone. I have made company with the land and the light that moves across it.” Few have captured the brilliance and pleasure of his prose poetry. We are fortunate to share his journey.
Hershel Lipow, Community Development Specialist, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (retired)
Barry Wides, Deputy Comptroller for Community Affairs, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
"I was deeply moved by Tim Herwig's The Long Way Home. For me, much of the power and impact I felt was conveyed by his humility, gifts for clear yet understated description, and the slow unfolding of the interior territory of memory, pain and healing. Of course, as a fellow Midwesterner, there was also much by way of recognition, echoes of remembered persons and places from my own early years on my Danish grandparent's farm in NW Iowa, and the free-wheeling imagination I often felt in those wind-swept corn and soybean fields. But I did not have the exploitive encounter in my teen years with a predatory teacher who abused his position of power. Tim's courageous writing affords me the privilege of being a witness to the crime, and also bear witness to his determination to, quite literally, walk beyond it into new light and life."
Rick Jackson is the Co-Founder & Senior Fellow, Center for Courage & Renewal located in Seattle, WA.
Tim Herwig's pilgrimage in The Long Way Home unfolds gradually in Tim's own awareness, and for the reader. I was struck by his very understated style of writing - effective, and very different from mine. My writing is filled with introspection, and I am not shy about sharing what is going on inside my head. Tim's observations are vivid but to the point, in a way that allows his readers to have their own experience. He does more listening than talking, and it is amazing how much detail he is able to draw from people that way, mostly keeping his own story to himself. And when his own story of trauma does come out, it arrives with a lot of force behind it, because of the spaces he leaves in between.
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Kurt Hoelting is the author of The Circumference of Home: One Man's Yearlong Quest for a Radically Local Life.
"Having grown up on the Midwest on the outskirts of rural areas about the same time as Herwig, I appreciated the observations about life there at this time. The descriptions of the countryside were striking and the conversations with the somewhat quirky people Herwig encountered were highly amusing. Herwig's own self-reflections on his life during the down time on his five-week journey were moving. I would highly recommend this book to people who enjoyed similar self-reflections, such as a Walden, North Towards Home, On the Road, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."