Unsettled

by Laurie Woodford

Overview

At the age of forty-nine, driven by an urgent restlessness, Laurie Woodford rents out her house, packs her belongings into two suitcases, and relocates to Asia. What begins as an opportunity to teach college English overseas, evolves into a nomadic adventure as Laurie works and volunteers in South Korea, Ethiopia, Peru, Spain, and Mexico. After four years of traveling, Laurie's return "home" to the U.S. becomes an unexpected adventure of its own when she ends up in Arkansas and meets Bruce, a bird-loving, bearded Quaker, who challenges her to reconcile her life of fierce independence with her longing to feel settled and loved.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781956692853
Publisher:	Unsolicited Press
Publication date:	01/02/2024
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Laurie Woodford is a memoirist, fiction writer, and essayist whose work has appeared in The Antioch Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Minnesota Review, Little Patuxent Review and Catamaran. For over twenty years, she taught English to college students in the U.S., South Korea, and China. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Originally from upstate New York, Laurie now lives with her amazing husband, Bruce, and wonder dog, Journey, in the outskirts of Austin, Texas. For more, visit her at www.lauriewoodford.com.

Editorial Reviews

2024-01-11
A middle-aged woman embarks on a yearslong adventure around the world in this memoir.

Feeling a bit too settled (“like the soft sweatpants I’d fish from my dresser drawer each Saturday morning”) in Rochester, New York, after her divorce, the 49-year-old author decided to let her growing feeling of wanderlust take the lead and headed to South Korea to teach English at a university. Each place that Woodford visited over the next few years, whether volunteering at an orphanage in Ethiopia or working on a goat farm in Spain, brought both the sense of adventure she so deeply craved and a nagging sense of loneliness: “The woman carried an Ethiopia guidebook in one hand. The man shouldered a small backpack. They held hands. They looked a team. I felt a warm flush of desire. They were explorers, together. Who needed a compass when they had one another? I named them the Travelsmiths.” When the author eventually found herself back in the United States, this time teaching at the English Language Institute of Arkansas, she experienced a growing relationship with the affable Bruce. The select stories that Woodford chooses to tell, such as her opening account of a gynecologist visit in South Korea, may not always be the most expected ones—they are, however, all highly entertaining. The author’s conversational tone and refreshingly frank language make the reading experience feel like listening to a friend’s fascinating travel stories. The narrative could benefit from added length—readers will likely be left longing for more details (perhaps about the logistics of living abroad) or for a deeper reflection on her emotional connections to each stop along her journey. That being said, what Woodford does include will leave many readers joyful, hopeful, and with the distinct feeling that anything is possible.

An amusing and heartwarming memoir that shows it’s never too late to begin an adventure.

Kirkus Reviews