“Written during COVID-19 lockdowns, Off the Tracks is an enchanting, lyrical reflection on memory, travel, and passenger trains.”
——Forward Reviews
“In this pensive outing, Mulloy (As Little As Nothing) reflects on the history and merits of train travel…Readers will be persuaded that traveling can be more than a means for getting from point A to point B.”
—— Publishers Weekly
I am a writer, editor, and mentor, with a side interest in photography, originally from the Maritimes who has lived in Poland, the UK, the US, and now lives in Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada.
I come from New Brunswick, Canada, where I return to twice a year. I lived in Poland for three years, initially as a teacher of English language in the seaside town of Sopot, followed by two years in the public relations department at the Foreign Investment Agency in Warsaw. This was in the early nineties so I was witness to Poland’s transformation away from communism towards capitalism. After that I went England where I completed my MA in Studies in Fiction at the University of East Anglia. There I met my husband and stayed, working at Community Music East for seven years, while he finished his doctorate. The next stop was Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, for my husband’s post-doc. This is where our daughter was born. After a year we moved to Kitchener-Waterloo, where I joined The New Quarterly as a fiction editor for two years, before becoming editor in 2011, and creative director of the newly established Wild Writers Literary Festival later that year. I have worked as part of the Wild Writers Literary Festival mentorship program, the French River Creative Writing Retreat and the Writers Union of Canada Mentorship Microgrant Program.
My writing has often occurred around the edges—of jobs, of moves, of helping to raise our daughter—and in 2018 my novel The Deserters, about the aftermath of war, was published by Vehicule Press. It was shortlisted for the ReLit Award. As Little As Nothing (ECW Press, 2022) takes place in the UK in the year before World War II, and explores early feminism, through women who take up flying and reproductive rights. My creative nonfiction book Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in the Year of No Travel will be published by ECW Press in 2024.
OFF THE TRACKs:
A MEDITATION ON TRAIN JOURNEYS IN A TIME OF NO TRAVEL
Available on April 30, 2024
Pre-order now at your local independent bookstore or at:
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"I read Off the Tracks in one sitting, on a couch by a window that transformed into a European couchette, a stagecoach, a dining car speeding through a Maritime landscape and more on journeys that were remembered, imagined, and hoped for. Sparked by a stillness in time, Mulloy writes in beautiful spare prose of travel as an act of the mind and memory, the ever-changing notion of home, and covers landscapes that are both geographic and metaphoric. Her travelling companions are historic as well as intimate, and always interesting, while Mulloy, a thoughtful, nuanced, and engaging guide.”
—Emily Urquhart, author of Ordinary Wonder Tales
"Pamela Mulloy's Off The Tracks is like 'slow travel' itself: absorbing, with many grace notes of observant and profound perceptions on the whole project of moving across space - preferably by train. Like Rebecca Solnit, Mulloy is an expert storyteller, allowing her personal relationship with travel to open doors onto travel's relationship with history, gender, politics and the whole project of self-hood. Perceptively written, it is full of fascinating insights on how travel allows us to discover and understand our world."
—Jean McNeil, author of Ice Diaries: A Memoir
"Mulloy sends us vivid dispatches on the beautiful topic of trains and train dreams, leaping easily from the Napoleonic Wars to Google Maps, botany and Bronte to Italian movies. Off the Tracks recounts both psychic and physical journeys, past and present, parallel trips to international destinations and, perhaps more importantly, the in-between places of travel. This is an intimate memoir, brimming with pleasing tangents and informed by family, history, lit, and wit."
—Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Touch Anywhere to Begin
Train travel is having a renaissance. Grand old routes that had been canceled, or were moldering in neglect, have been refurbished as destinations in themselves. The Rocky Mountaineer, the Orient Express, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad run again in all their glory.
I have always loved train travel. Whether returning to the Maritimes every year with my daughter on the Ocean, or taking my family across Europe to Poland, trains have been a linchpin of my life. As COVID locked us down, I began an imaginary journey that recalled the trips I have taken, as well as those of others. Whether it was Mary Wollstonecraft traveling alone to Sweden in the late 1700s, or the incident that had Charles Dickens forever fearful of trains, or the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt trapped in her carriage in a midwestern blizzard in the 1890s, or Sir John A. Macdonald’s wife daring to cross the Rockies tied to the cowcatcher at the front of the train, the stories explore the odd mix of adventure and contemplation that travel permits.
Thoughtful, observant, and fun, Off the Tracks is part social history of trains, travel memoir, and a broader meditation on the meaning, importance and symbolism of travel. A blend of research and personal experience that, like a good train ride, will whisk you into another world.
AS LITTLE AS NOTHING
ORDER NOW AT:
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“A buoyant and affecting portrait of four disparate souls striving to become their true selves on the cusp of major social change.” — Kathleen Winter, author of Undersong
“With intimacy, acuity, and grace, Pamela Mulloy captures the complex inner lives of her characters, who yearn to become themselves as England lurches into war.” — Jack Wang, author of We Two Alone
"Mulloy gracefully captures the lives of two women who, against the backdrop of a looming war, must reinvent themselves. Like the best historical fiction, As Little As Nothing helps illuminate the issue of reproductive rights by shining a light on the past." — Claire Cameron author of The Last Neanderthal
Set in the south of England in the tumultuous year before World War II, As Little As Nothing focusses on the lives of two women: Miriam, recovering from her fifth miscarriage, who looks to flight as an escape from both the impending war and the disappointments in her life; and Audrey, a 53-year-old, upper-class activist (an acolyte of Stella Browne, a Canadian reproductive rights activist who lived in Britain at the time) who has shunned her society, travels the UK lecturing on reproductive rights, lives in a Reading Caravan, and whose daily ritual includes a swim in a nearby river.
In researching the novel, I became fascinated by female flyers and the history of reproductive rights and saw the opportunity to use flight both literally in highlighting this important early expression of feminism and metaphorically for women who took flight from the burden of unwanted pregnancy. With the war looming, the novel uses its interplay of voices to explore themes of resilience, the strength of new bonds, and the various ways we reinvent ourselves.
I would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council and the Waterloo Regional Arts Fund for their support in the writing of As Little As Nothing.
Read a review in the Literary Review of Canada here.
the deserters
Some nice things people have said about The Deserters:
“Sparely and beautifully written, The Deserters is a story, not of escape, but of the deep, human need to belong to a place, and to one another.”
—Helen Humphreys
“Here is the fallout of war, the logic of betrayal, told with grace, elegance, and an unflinching gaze.”
—Tamas Dobozy
“In The Deserters, her beautiful and understated debut novel about those who love, those who fight, and those who leave, Pamela Mulloy makes connections between characters, continents and centuries and creates a constellation.”
—Kerry Clare
Eugenie is trying - and mostly failing - to restore an inherited old farm in New Brunswick while her husband, a master carpenter, develops his marquetry skills in Spain. Deep in the backwoods of her property Eugenie meets Dean, a deserter from the US Army suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, who is living rough, and hiding out from immigration officials and the army that wants to redeploy him to Iraq.
Eugenie hires Dean to help bring the farm back to working order, a task that she has just realized is not possible on her own, as she waits on the return of her husband. Eugenie and Dean fall into a relationship, even as Dean is tormented by flashbacks, nightmares, and flickering memories of his wartime experiences. The isolation of the homestead allows Eugenie and Dean to create their own idyll, where the truth of her faltering marriage and the evidence of his PTSD are both denied, until Dean is forced to come to terms with an incident in Iraq that changed him forever.
Shifting between three continents, and focusing on Dean and Eugenie’s intense and tangled relationship, The Deserters explores themes of trust, isolation, abandonment, and emotional disconnection in a world dramatically altered by the experience of war.
Here are my recommendations on books discussing women in history challenging the limitations of their gender:
My recent publications include this essay on missing travel during the pandemic:
“That World Elsewhere,” Literary Review of Canada, March 2022
My short fiction has been published in the UK, and also in Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017).
I’m a member of the Writers Union of Canada and the Creative Nonfiction Collective.
For inquiries regarding my upcoming publications, please contact:
Claire Pokorchak
Publicity Manager, ECW Press
claire@ecwpress.com
To get in touch with me directly, please complete the form below.
