NICHOLAS TRIOLO

SEBASTOPOL --

Copperfield’s Books welcomes writer and filmmaker Nicholas Triolo to Sebastopol in celebration of his powerful debut - The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere.

Audience Q&A and book signing to follow the discussion.

This event is free and open to the public.

The Way Around is the kind of book my soul perpetually yearns for. It reshaped how I see the world. --Robert Moor, author of On Trails: An Exploration

Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was imbued with a particularly acute form of our intensely goal-oriented culture. "Do the reps," he internalized. "Commit to the work. Grind for your dreams." Shortly after graduating from college, he embarked on a solo circumnavigation of the globe. And then after returning to the States, he threw himself into ultrarunning, all to combat a deepening discontent.

While traveling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object--a kind of "ritualized remembering" birthed by place. Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. First, he completes the sacred thirty-two-mile revolution around Tibet's Mount Kailash, in search of a cultural counter to Western linearity. Then, following his mother's diagnosis with breast cancer, he returns home to California and takes part in an annual circuit of Mount Tamalpais, tracing a route made famous by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And then finally, he meets up with a quirky hydrogeologist in Butte, Montana, and joins his walk around the Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in the country.

At once uncommonly humble and thrillingly transcendent, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer landscapes, The Way Around models what it means to experience a true revolution of heart and home--for the flourishing of all.

Smart, funny, wise of mind and vast of heart, The Way Around offers a beautiful, intricate rebuke to our obsession with linearity and outcome. In place of the summit, it argues for the circumambulation; in place of the line, the circle; in place of the goal, the return. Over its course, the book buds its own subtle circles-kora, ourobouros, beaten bounds-and its patterns and rhythms begin to reshape themselves into rings and revolutions, until on the final pages both reader and writer are returned to the point of origin-though, of course, profoundly changed by the circumambulation that has brought them there. -Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Author: Nicholas Triolo is a writer, filmmaker, photographer, activist, and long-distance trail runner. His writing and images have been featured in Orion, Outside, Terrain.org, and Trail Runner. He has directed two documentary films, "The Crossing" and "Shaped by Fire," and collaborated with Salomon on a film about touring and training Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Triolo's films have been Official Selections for several international film festivals and featured on influential platforms such as Patagonia's Dirtbag Diaries, Upworthy, and Outside magazine. Triolo is based in Missoula, Montana, and you can read more about him at nicholastriolo.net.