About Calls to Adventure

Calls to Adventure invites you to take a moment from your life, to peruse a post or more, and to decide if the writing/photographs/video posts interest you. You’re invited to join conversations — not just with me — but with others who make comments. You don’t have to leave a foot print; you might review a post and leave it at that. Or you might visit and settle in for a while. Welcome, either way.

Calls to Adventure takes its name from scholar-mythologist Joseph Campbell (no relation), who labeled the first step in any journey narrative as a “call to adventure.” Writing is certainly an adventure, as is/are traveling, parenting, questioning, going to college, pressing yourself beyond the familiar and into the uncertain terrain of new places, new people, new ideas.

Calls to adventure exist everywhere in daily life. Our challenge is to recognize them, pause, and then choose to decide if we’ll answer the call.

What’s this blog going to be about?

Writing, reading & great books, teaching, traveling, parenting, squirrels, photography, current events, the ways college students talk. The outdoors and indoors. Mountains. (I like mountains.) And about what you want it to be: make comments about what interests you.

I hope my posts avoid vain, banal observations in favor of more meaningful subjects. That said, the absurd calls — usually listed as a toll-free number — and I can’t resist occasional forays into funny commentary. (Funny to me.)

Who’s this blog for?

I’m a college lecturer in writing, and previous blogs I’ve created were just for my students. A limitation of such a narrowed audience is that students might miss what I want them to discover: we compose for many audiences, for many purposes, and in many genres. The situation determines the choices we make. Just as important: writing is messy — rarely  refined the first time around. Blogging is a great medium for not-ready-for-prime-time writing.

So, Calls to Adventure is an invitation to talk with my students, as well as with friends, strangers, fellow travelers, or folks who’ve mistaken me for someone else.

But are you legit? I mean, who are you?

I’m a teacher and writer. But I’m also a father, husband, son, outdoorsperson, soccer coach, reader, and questioner. I earned a living for 20 years as a professional writer — in advertising, journalism, & book publishing — and wrote everything from power-tool-accessory catalogs to television commercials to cover/feature stories for national magazines. I’ve authored two adventure travel guidebooks, plus ghostwritten and edited a handful of other books across genres. In 2000, I founded an independent publishing house, Walkabout Press, and while we’re still “open” for business, the website is like an abandoned campsite (www.walkaboutpress.com). I’ve not done much with the company since I earned an MFA in Fiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2007. Then I began teaching. Check out: www.malcolmwcampbell.com for an overview of my peripatetic career.

Who can I complain to?

The Authorities.

Seriously.

To contact me outside of public blog correspondence, shoot a note to “malcolm” and then the “@” symbol, followed by “walkaboutpress.com.” Or you can log on to Facebook and message me via this link to my Facebook.