I’ll always love the American Southwest because it’s where I first encountered the desert.
Arid places are my personal landscape — and this one contains more stories than most.
Arizona’s defining social characteristic is transience.
According to today’s guest, outsiders move there “to make a fresh start and reinvent themselves, or to find a refuge where they can be their weirder wilder selves without attracting a lot of attention.”
It’s a place where social guardrails are weak, and outlandish behaviour is the order of the day.
Arizona doesn’t just reflect national trends, it exaggerates them. Is it a bellwether for the world to come?
The British writer Richard Grant has lived in Arizona for more than twenty years, and his latest book is a fascinating blend of memoir, history, local issues and encounters with strange characters.
He’s one of today’s best narrative nonfiction writers, and one my favourite writers on place.
Richard’s books include A Race to the Bottom of Crazy: Dispatches from Arizona, Ghost Riders: Travels With American Nomads (winner of the 2004 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award), God’s Middle Finger, and Dispatches From Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta. He writes for Smithsonian magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph UK, Aeon and several other publications.
You can read more about him on his website. And follow him on Twitter.
We spoke about the lure of the desert, Arizona’s southern border, water shortages, and the world’s biggest machine gun shoot.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
We also mentioned:
Books by Charles Bowden: The Charles Bowden Reader, El Sicario, Blue Desert, Desierto
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