Museum Beat
Calgary based writer Will Ferguson has made a career out of curiosity.
Ferguson, who was born in Fort Vermillion in Northern Alberta, has travelled all over the world from hitchhiking around the backwoods of Japan to Moose Jaw.
“I find both of them equally fascinating,” he said. He is very familiar with Lethbridge and Southern Alberta, having dedicated two chapters to Lethbridge in one of his books.
For now he is looking forward to coming to Lethbridge, May 27 to visit the Nikka Yuko Japanese Gardens and to participate in the Queen’s Jubilee celebration at the Galt Museum.
“My wife is Japanese, so when she gets homesick, she likes to come to the Japanese Gardens because it is so authentic. Even though the plants are Canadian, the design is Japanese. So we’ll come down on the Saturday to see it,” he continued.
He travelled in Northern Ireland after the troubles just to see the effect on the people and in July will be going to Rwanda to do the research for a book on the twentieth anniversary of the genocides.
“I’ll be concentrating on my Canadian travels, seeing the polar bears in Churchill and Moose Jaw,” he said.
“ Travel writing is probably the easiest thing to get into because it’s always your story. If you go to a resort in Guadalajara, then that’s your story and your experience,” he advised to prospective travel writers. The most important thing is to have a sense of adventure and curiosity, though enough common sense not to get into dangerous situations.
“Start out in newspapers, because newspapers are always looking for travel stories, then work your way up to magazines and books.”
He started his career as a travel writer while hitch-hiking in Japan, where he spent several years teaching English.
“I was living in Japan, teaching and they have very poor bus service in Japan, so I started hitch-hiking, and nobody hitch-hikes in Japan, so I had people inviting me over for dinner and I thought that was pretty cool. Then I thought I’d pitch the idea of writing about hitch-hiking to a Japanese newspaper. They passed on it, but it planted the bug in me,” he said adding he moved to PEI and decided to write an article about Japanese customs.
or of the Royal Alberta Museum.
She will be bringing the Alberta Quilt project to Lethbridge, which
examines heritage quilts made in Alberta or brought to the province by
immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and
examines quilting in the twenty-first century.
