I first met James MacDuff on the Halifax waterfront in July 2019. We were both MFA students at the University of King’s College and had been paired as book buddies. I told him about my plans for Peace by Chocolate, and he told me his idea to turn his travel adventures into a memoir. Something was missing, though ….
Then our mutual friend, 2020, turned up and I lost touch with James.
Earlier this year, Pottersfield Press asked me to edit a new book: The Illogical Adventure, by James MacDuff and Mirriam Mweemba. I was thrilled. Many are called to write a book, but few answer. James and Mirriam have answered with a light, lovely memoir of how they both found what they had searched continents for: love deep enough to change your solo course and make a new life with another human.
Mirriam steals the show (sorry James), with her powerful writing about being a little girl in her rural Zambian village, looking up at the planes passing overhead, and dreaming she could one day be on such a flight. Since the pandemic, she has built a new life for herself in Canada, started a family, and won the Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction with her first book, co-authored with her husband.
They launched the book at the Halifax Central Library on Sunday, with strong support from friends and family, including their own two darling children. Near the end, James explained the title came from a Robert Louis Stevenson essay. RLS was not writing adventure stories that day, but reflecting on how a chance meeting with an American in Paris changed his Scottish life.
“Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world,” Stevenson wrote.
True words, and if you want to leap into an illogical adventure that will take you around the world and bring you home to the good things of the heart, buy this book. You’ll support two new authors and have the chance to reflect on your own illogical adventures.