Going Home is the record of a three-week cycling trip undertaken by a middle-aged man and his son, pedaling 2,500 kilometers from New Orleans back up the map to their home in Canada. For the father it was a brief return to the country that was his home for the first two decades of his life. For his son, it was an introduction to the country that had shaped his father. This book is about this land seen more intimately than is possible in a car. It is also about the people they met along the way: 'Saint' Cecil of Natalbany, Louisiana; Ma and the homebody farmer at Ma's Hitching Post in rural Tennessee; Dennis 'The Hustler' in Nashville; Rose and Albert at The Jam Factory in Louisville; the 'Third Brother' in Bowling Green; Jimmy of The Crow Bar in Sabina; Billy 'The Biker' on the Geneva Strip; and many others, all people that somehow within minutes (or hours) came to personify and capture, like apt images in a poem, the heart of America.
About the Author: Ken Stange is primarily a writer but also a visual artist, with numerous juried and curated exhibitions of his prints, and his work is represented in numerous public and private collections. His literary works include twelve books of poetry and fiction, as well as hundreds of literary periodical publications, and he recently won the Exile/Vanderbilt prize for short fiction. He calls all his books "hypotheses" because of his interest in the integration of the sciences and the arts. (His book, A Smoother Pebble, A Prettier Shell, published by Penumbra Press, was a collection of his art works integrated with poems and an extended essay on the relationship of science to visual art.) He is Professor Emeritus at Nipissing University, where in continues to teach a course on the Psychology of Art and Creativity in their Distant Learning program. He has had articles in computer magazines, written commercial software for test evaluation, been an 'Arts' columnist, as well as published in refereed scientific journals on empirical aesthetics, statistics, and computer research applications. He has presented papers at numerous international conferences, most of which relate to creativity, and recently gave a TEDx talk on "Redefining Creativity". For almost a decade he has been devoting much of his energy to work on a major book about the similarities and differences of creativity in the arts and the sciences-an excerpt of which appears in Mercury Press's anthology Imagination In Action. More biographical info can be found at: KenStange.com