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Frank Bures' Favourite Articles
Head to our Substack for a list of all-time great articles chosen by Frank Bures, author of outstanding travel and adventure writing, plus classic articles about everything from stolen bikes that and penis theft (?!), to squat toilets and an epic canoe race on the Mississippi. Read all his best work here, and check out his new book about canoeing on the Mississippi and beyond.
It may be wiser to create the place you want to live, rather than to keep trying to find it.
Frank Bures
Stay Put
Gary Snyder from the Upriver/Downriver newsletter Number 10, circa 1991, as shared by Nam Henderson:
Without further rhetoric or utopian scheming, I have a simple suggestion that if followed would begin to bring wilderness, farmers, people, and the economies back. That is: don’t move. Stay still. Once you find a place that feels halfway right, and it seems time, settle down with a vow not to move any more. Then, take a look at one place on earth, one circle of people, on realm of beings over time, conviviality and maintenance will improve. School boards and planning commissions will have better people on them, and larger and more widely concerned audiences will be attending. Small environmental issues will be attended to. More voters will turn out, because local issues at least make a difference, can be won—and national scale politics too might improve, with enough folks getting out there. People begin to really notice the plants, birds, stars, when they see themselves as members of a place. Not only do they begin to work the soil, they go out hiking, explore the back country or the beach, get on the Freddies’ ass for mismanaging Peoples’ land, and doing that as locals counts! Early settlers, old folks, are valued and respected, we make an effort to learn their stories and pass it on to our children, who will live here too. We look deeply back in time to the original inhabitants, and far ahead to our own descendants, in the mind of knowing a context, with its own kind of tools, boots, songs. Mainstream thinkers have overlooked it: real people stay put. And when things are coasting along ok, they can also take off and travel, there’s no delight like swapping stories downstream. Dont Move! I’d say this really works because here on our side of the Sierra, Yuba river country, we can begin to see some fruits of a mere fifteen years’ inhabitation, it looks good.
Nam resurfaced that in response to maya weeks, who writes:
I almost never feel that I am doing enough, unless I’m burying my body in sand at the beach or paddling over a set with my mouth full of salt or building electric fence for sheep (which I have only done twice) or performing. But I have spent my entire adult life and most of my childhood defining myself by what I do: I’m a writer, I’m an artist, I’m an activist, I’m an environmental justice worker, etc., etc., etc. And as it turns out I have done kind of a lot of things even though of the 3 books I have written I haven’t published a single one; and I still don’t manage a flock of sheep, let alone any land; and I haven’t done a performance since like the beginning of last year; and I’m on some kind of weird hiatus from surfing while I do a bunch of work (namely, environmental justice advocacy and writing and training as a shepherd and figuring out how I am going to have a long-term relationship to land I care about) and now that my job is not getting the Environmental Protection Agency grant we put in so much work to apply for last fall I am back on the job market again (if you have any leads on environmental communications jobs I might be a fit for, please send them my way; thank you!) and that too takes time. But in the course of getting a lot of things done, I’ve sacrificed a lot. I’ve sacrificed stability. I still don’t have a retirement account even though I’m in my mid-30s. I’ve lived in a few different countries and many different towns and cities. My close friends are all over the place. I just moved yet again, and I still don’t have a dining table. Most of all, I’ve sacrificed time with loved ones. I’m an energetic person by nature. I half-joke that it runs in my family (the other half of me is dead serious). I can’t stand to see a goal unfulfilled. And what I am recognizing, at this historical moment that we are all living through whether we like it or not, is that that means I need to reorient my goals a little. So that they are less about doing, and more about being. About being stable. About being outside. About being around those I love.
And both of those remind me of something from Frank Bures that I posted here a long time ago:
[I]t may be wiser to try to create the place you want to live, rather than to keep trying to find it.
Given all that and maya’s emphasis on being, I am also re-reading my notes and collection titled “Who are you now?” where I will also be adding a pointer to this collection.
From penis thieves to voodoo death, strange mental disorders can tell us a lot about the deeper layers of any culture, finds an unusual new travelogue
@newscientist magazine reviews The Geography of Madness by Frank Bures: "A travel book with a quest...[Bures] is a brisk, perceptive, congenial travelling companion, thinking seriously about the mysteries of culture and illness."
Bures explores the connection between culture and mental health, centering on a global phenomenon in which men believe their penises have been stolen.
Frank Bures, author of The Geography of Madness, interviewed in @minnpost: "Bures traveled the world in search of these outbreaks of penis theft, and returned with an understanding that our surroundings make all the difference in what we believe and how we feel."
Frank Bures, an award-winning magazine writer who got his start in Madison, is out with a new book: “The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes.”
Isthmus talks globe-trotting, penis thievery, and The Geography of Madness by Frank Bures: "In The Geography of Madness, Bures explores the idea of culture — What is it? How do we learn it? How is it shaped and how does it shape us? — from the vantage point of his world travels, which are spontaneous, extensive and kind of weird."
Learn more about The Geography of Madness here.
If ever my penis were stolen, I'd want Frank Bures to hunt for it.
“If ever my penis were stolen, I'd want Frank Bures to hunt for it ... Bures, a Minneapolis-based travel writer, turns in a reportorial tour de force in this examination of culture, belief and madness."”
This guy gets it.
You can get it, too.
The Geography of Madness is an investigation of “culture-bound” syndromes, which are far stranger than they sound. Why is it, for example, that some men believe, against all reason, that vandals stole their penises, even though they’re in good physical…
We’ve been yelling PENIS THIEVES for a while now, and for good reason. But, you ask, what other culture-bound syndromes are there? Oh reader, there are plenty—and here culture expert and author of The Geography of Madness Frank Bures shares some of the most fascinating he’s encountered.
