When I tell friends and strangers I hope will become friends about my experience on the Camino de Santiago, I never lead with the blisters, the sore knees, or the rainstorms that seemed to last for ten straight days across the meseta. While I eventually do get to those more mundane pains from the trek, I always start with the stories.
Whether it was the young attorney who wanted to become a death penalty abolitionist but had to work corporate law to pay off her student loan debt, the retired man who told me that he hoped to reconnect with his daughters after “getting his head right,” or the preschool teacher grieving the loss of her fiancée, what I remember most about the Camino is not the long days on the trail, but the long conversations about who we were, who we hoped to be, and who we hoped to leave behind near one of those yellow arrows.
As a recovering English teacher, I realize that I want to help tell some of those stories. Inspired by the original literary pilgrim, Geoffrey Chaucer, some of whose pilgrims were headed across the city to Spain, I want to experience the Camino again and share the stories of those making the trek.
Like in The Canterbury Tales, each entry will have two components: the story of the pilgrim told in their own words, and the story they want to share, a work of creative non-fiction I write after our interview.
While I have no literary aspirations to match one of the greatest works of English literature, I am excited to tell—through portrait, video, and text—the chronicles of contemporary pilgrims and the stories that move them.
When I think about what I loved most about the Camino, it’s how the stories we shared connected us, no matter how far apart we were in status, kilometers, or outlook before the journey, and I look forward to sharing the stories of pilgrims, both for those who have experienced the magic of the Way and for those who have only dreamed of it.