 Scatter
the Mud: A Traveller's Medley
AUTHOR: Nancy Lyon ISBN: 0921833423
Nancy Lyon is hardly your typical traveller. Although her travel pieces have been widely published in The New York Times, GEO, Ms., Travel and Leisure, enRoute, The Montreal Gazette, The chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald, to name a few of the publications from which this collection has been culled, Lyon is an adept at "scattering the mud"—an old Irish expression used to describe a kind of rough or ungentlemanly travel. Lyon's adventures began when she was 13 and her mother, a bored Indianapolis housewife, loaded her three young daughters into a station wagon and headed off to Mexico for the summer. Despite knowing no Spanish, temporarily losing her sister in a tortilla factory, and almost drowning in the Gulf of Mexico, Lyon survived the trip. And she was hooked. Since then, Nancy Lyon has lived in many places and circled the globe, exploring UFO sites in Florida and even stranger sights in SoHo, barely escaping witch doctors in Guadeloupe, wintering on Inishbofin, and taking her mother along on a hilarious busking tour of Europe. For Lyon is also an accomplished musician; her love of music combined with her insatiable desire to travel have taken her into the streets across North America and Europe, busking with her medieval Irish harp, button accordian and tin whistle, literally singing for her supper. Lyon's music has served as her passport to adventure in the streets and cafés all across North America and Europe. Check out Nancy's web site for more information: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/scatter_the_mud/index.htm
REVIEWS: "Lyon is a virtuoso
performer of traditional Irish music on the harp and other instruments
and her musical talent has been her passport to the world. There seems
to be hardly a place on earth she has not visited twice, and there's definitely
no subject—UFO sites in Florida, Guadeloupe witch doctors, Arthurian
legends, Dublin pub food—she is not interested in and cannot illuminate
with prose that is by turns as frenetic as a Galway barroom jig, or as
balefully evocative as the most mournful Celtic ballad. There are echoes
here of James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Jack Kerouac, Van Morrison and the
Chieftains. But ultimately, you have to concede that it's pure Nancy Lyon,
virtuoso as well of the lettered keyboard. As such, it also constitutes
one of the most impressive literary debuts in recent memory."
"The motto of Nancy Lyon's collection of travel essays could be 'Have tin whistle, will travel.' Carting along an Irish harp, a button accordian and a pen and journal can't hurt either, provided you are, like Lyon, an accomplished musician who has a way with words. You might even consider bringing your 62-year-old mother along for the ride—that's another story, one that Lyon published in Ms. magazine and has wisely included in Scatter the Mud. At the end of the 1970s , Lyon pursued her love of Irish traditional music to its birthplace. There she became an expert in pub etiquette and steak-and-kidney pie-making, had a nightmare-inspiring experience in a fairy circle outside Killarney and lived for a time on the hauntingly remote island of Inishbofin off the coast of Connemara where she survived Granuaille's Curse, 'a three-week siege of flu, colds, tonsillitis and wild stomach pains.' Although Lyon chronicles various other encounters of the unusual kind with witch doctors and UFO abductees and discusses the perils of 'bilingual love' in Montreal, her experience as a teenage Druid at Stonehenge in the late 1960s and her memories of high school in Indianapolis with her classmate David Letterman (his yearbook photo is included), it is her Irish stories that are particularly resonant. This is the perfect
book for the armchair traveller with a penchant for perceptive character
portraits. Lyon consistently combines an open heart and easygoing attitude
with a fine journalistic eye for detail and a sharp story."
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