If Roads Change Their Names... (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781956092080)

If Roads Change their names, if Courthouse becomes Huegenot, then Cary, then Route Five, then why can't Stu become Mohamed or Lisa become Athena? In this collection of stories, photo journals, and poems, David Patteson and Rebecca Taylor explore the intersection of travel and change, how venturing into unknown geographies, whether physical or spiritual, presents opportunities that are both tantalizing and fraught with danger. Will a drunk teen survive the familiar drive home? Will a brain-injured father re-member his family? Will the stranger in a Greyhound bus station catch that four-year-old girl in an "innocent" game of tag? Will a fox find his den when confronted with a new construction barricade? Will a middle-class American photographer find beauty in the West's poorest country? Will left lead to that brown-eyed girl?

The poet Erik Campbell says that real experience happens when "... one chronically doesn't know what the hell is going on." There are no clear roadmaps in these stories, only disorientation and myriad possibilities, some beneficial and others disastrous.