My Hero Robert Falcon Scott

Or, why I'm dressed the way I am in my logo pic

Some of you may have wondered what exactly is depicted in my photo for The Entropy Hotel. That’s me, on a day when I asked every writer in the class I was teaching on Zoom to come dressed as their main character. I didn’t want to leave myself out, so I dressed as an Antarctic explorer, one of three main characters in my forthcoming novel TERRA NOVA. To embody my fictional explorer, I put together a home-made costume of fur hat, fur scarf, heavy sweater, glacier glasses, and a string to which I attached a pair of mittens. TERRA NOVA is titled in homage to Robert Falcon Scott, whose expedition of that name spanned from 1910-13, though he himself perished on the way back from the South Pole in March of 1912.

I recently wrote about my fascination with Scott, so I won’t repeat that here. I’ll steer you, if I may, to that piece, which now appears on the Cognoscenti website of WBUR, Boston’s NPR station. I love that the first photograph you see of Scott within the piece depicts him writing. Along with his flawed heroism and the nobility of his expedition, his written record is truly impressive, both in quantity and quality. I haven’t sat down to read more than a few key entries in many years, lest my own prose be shaped by his. But let’s just say that all you have to do is read his final few missives to begin to have a sense of how fascinating a figure Scott was.

I hope you’ll take a look at Cognoscenti. And in the meantime, now you know why I’m dressed like that.