Writer Profile
Books & Essays
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Title:
Walking to Canterbury: A Modern Journey Through Chaucer's Medieval England
Date Published:
Ballantine Books 2003Description:
More than six hundred years ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered by King Henry II?s knights. Before the Archbishop?s blood dried on the Cathedral floor, the miracles began. The number of pilgrims visiting his shrine in the Middle Ages was so massive that the stone floor wore thin where they knelt to pray. They came seeking healing, penance, or a sign from God. Chaucer?s The Canterbury Tales, one of the greatest, most enduring works of English literature, is a bigger-than-life drama based on the experience of the medieval pilgrim. Power, politics, friendship, betrayal, martyrdom, miracles, and stories all had a place on the sixty mile path from London to Canterbury, known as the Pilgrim?s Way.
Walking to Canterbury is Jerry Ellis?s moving and fascinating account of his own modern pilgrimage along that famous path. Filled with incredible details about medieval life, Ellis?s tale strikingly juxtaposes the contemporary world he passes through on his long hike with the history that peeks out from behind an ancient stone wall or a church. Carrying everything he needs on his back, Ellis stops at pubs and taverns for food and shelter and trades tales with the truly captivating people he meets along the way, just as the pilgrims from the twelfth century would have done. Embarking on a journey that is spiritual and historical, Ellis reveals the wonders of an ancient trek through modern England toward the ultimate goal: enlightenment.
Book Review #1:
Ellis, a mystically inclined journalist of English and Cherokee descent, re-creates the Canterbury Tales' central journey on foot in this informative but unsatisfying follow-up to Walking the Trail: One Man's Journey Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears. As in that work, he seeks connections with his ancestry by engaging strangers along the walk, a journalistic method that might seem uniquely unsuited to outlining the English character. Remarkably, though, he connects with a good number of Tales-worthy eccentrics, including a Steve McQueen-loving monk and runaway teenagers who recite Chaucer from memory. Compelling as these characters may be, they never engage the reader; Ellis is satisfied with merely bouncing his own minor revelations off of them. " `Yeah,' I said, `the inner world means something to me as well' " is about where his easily won epiphanies bound along. Happily, he often veers into historical rambles that offer portraits of medieval life. His desire to use every piece of information he's uncovered leads to some leaps (as when a Ronald McDonald statue prompts a mini-essay on the role of jesters), but these are some of the best sections in the book. What is more worth knowing than that French pilgrims carried wax replicas of eyeballs? If only his thoughts about the modern world were equally grounded in fact. Publishers Weekly
Book Review #2:
This charming and thoughtful book takes the reader on a modern-day pilgrimage as Ellis, who explored his Cherokee heritage in Walking the Trail, examines his English ancestry by walking the same path as Chaucer's fictional travelers. His week-long hike is filled with brief encounters with an array of interesting people, including Scotsmen reminiscing about their World War II experiences, a group of teenagers fascinated by Native American culture, and a woman who asks him to pray for her ill husband at the shrine to Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. He spends a night at the same monastery at which medieval pilgrims stopped and there witnesses the moving consecration of a Carmelite nun. Throughout, Ellis finds the welcome opportunity to interweave sections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as well as historical information about various aspects of everyday life during Chaucer's times. Black-and-white illustrations from medieval manuscripts are included. At times, Ellis tries a little too hard to make a connection between his journey and Chaucer's tales, but this is nonetheless an appealing account of one small part of his lifelong spiritual journey. Recommended for public libraries. Library journal
Book Review #3:
In the Middle Ages, Canterbury Cathedral was a holy place sought by many a troubled pilgrim. As immortalized in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, those seeking salvation or miracles made long and dangerous journeys, usually on foot, to the small town in southeast England where Archbishop Thomas a Becket was martyred. Ellis, who has walked Pilgrims' Way from London, now shares his experiences. More than simply a tale of a long walk, Ellis fills the pages with lines from Chaucer's most famous work and reflections on what the pilgrimage meant to the faithful. In the journey, he finds the opportunity to reach out to strangers and connect with them emotionally. Though not overtly religious, Ellis writes a great deal about his own spirituality, which owes much to his Cherokee ancestry. It is perhaps this influence that makes everything sacred and allows him to see beauty everywhere. His optimism and sense of peace are so powerful and contagious that even readers in the comforts of home will find this book an affirming spiritual experience. Booklist
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Title:
Marching through Georgia: My Walk along Sherman's Route
Date Published:
University of Georgia Press 2002Description:
In 1864 William Tecumseh Sherman made Civil War history with his infamous March to the Sea across Georgia. More than a century later, Jerry Ellis set out along the same route in search of the past and his southern and Cherokee heritage.
On Ellis's trek by foot from Atlanta to Savannah, he confronts the contradictions and complexities of his native region as he reflects on his own. From Macon's fabled Goat Man to Arthur "Cowboy" Brown, the Savannah street musician, we meet a vibrant, unregimented people, all of whom, like Ellis, are looking for their place with one eye on the past and one on the present.
Book Review #1:
"[Ellis] shows us where we're going by taking us where we've been, and Marching Through Georgia makes a fine journey of it in the process." Mary Garrett, The Advocate
Book Review #2:
"Sheds new light on an important part of our history . . . We discover what it meant and still means to be a Southerner."
Library Journal
Book Review #3:
"A book about seemingly ordinary people who do seemingly ordinary things, from drinking whisky to tending goats, that under Ellis's deft stylistic touch and wry sense of humor become extraordinary."
Publishers Weekly
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Title:
On the Trail of the Pony Express
Date Published:
Bison Books 2002Description:
Responding to the enduring lure of the West that captured his imagination as a child, Jerry Ellis decides to follow the trail of the Pony Express, a short-lived, hell-for-leather mail delivery service that lasted just one and a half years starting in 1860 but has marked itself in national memory ever since. Starting his journey in St. Joseph, Missouri, Ellis follows the Pony Express trail across Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada to the end of the line in San Francisco.
Ellis succeeds in completing his twenty-one-hundred-mile journey by foot, horseback, covered wagon, hitchhiking, and canoe. Open to what he finds, including his own frailties, Ellis reports with sympathy and humor on the strange variety of the modern West.
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Title:
Walking the Trail, One Man?s Journey along the Cherokee Trail of Tears
Date Published:
Bison Books 2001Description:
One fall morning Jerry Ellis donned a backpack and began a long, lonely walk: retracing the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the nine hundred miles his ancestors had walked in 1838. The trail was the agonizing path of exile the Cherokees had been forced to take when they were torn from their southeastern homeland and relocated to Indian Territory. Following in their footsteps, Ellis traveled through small southern towns, along winding roads, and amid quiet forests, encountering a memorable array of people who live along the trail today. Along the way he also came to glimpse the pain his ancestors endured and to learn about the true beauty of modern rural life and the worth of a man's character.
Book Review #1:
In late summer of 1989, Ellis, an unsuccessful Hollywood screenwriter suffering from midlife blues, set out to walk in reverse the 900-mile Trail of Tears traversed in 1838 by Cherokee Indians being herded by soldiers, in frigid winter, from their Southeast homeland to a reservation in what is now Oklahoma. Ellis, himself part Cherokee, says he wanted to honor those 4000 who died along the way and to rediscover the toughness of his youth. Unfortunately, neither aim is accomplished in this sexually charged and plainspoken account of his nearly two-month trek. The Trail's victims serve only as backdrop to the author's personal adventuring and respites in homes, dorms and motels. Read as travelogue and/or one lonely man's tussle with life, the book, even though exploitative of a tragic event, proves intermittently entertaining. Publishers Weekly
Book Review #2:
The forced move of 18,000 Cherokees from the Southeast to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma in 1838 is a hauntingly dark act of history that should not be forgotten. The author, part Cherokee himself, walked the Trail of Tears (in reverse) and writes of his experiences and thoughts along the way. It is a meandering, informal, and always lively account in the mold of William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways and other American "road" books that tell us more about the authors than they do about where they went. This one is sure to be a popular title in public libraries. Library Journal
Book Review #3:
Ellis, a free-lance writer who is part Cherokee Indian, journeys on foot from Oklahoma to his hometown of Fort Payne, Alabama--symbolically retracing the 900-mile path his ancestors took on their forced odyssey out of the southern states in 1838. It had something to do with having recently turned 40; something to do with a vision he'd had while writing a play about one Cherokee's experience of the Trail of Tears; and something to do with the importance of feeling free to walk across America without fear of death by violence. Whatever the reasons, Ellis--a former motorcycle-gang member and a modern-day romantic--buses and hitches his way to the Cherokee Nation's capital of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, hoists his 50-pound pack, and starts off along the shoulder of a lonely rural road toward the Trail of Tears's origin and the 18,000 Cherokees' original home. Along the way, he reflects less on the fate of his ancestors who, unlike him, had to travel this route in the midst of a brutal winter and who died by the thousands of starvation, exposure, and disease than on his own renegade past in Alabama, New York, and Hollywood, and on the remarkably strange 20th-century folks he encounters along the way. From the wistful Texan who recounts the story of his abuse-ridden boyhood, to the Charles Manson look-alike charging along the road with a rock clutched in his fist, to the confused but nubile young member of a Missouri religious cult with whom Ellis falls briefly in lust--these are the inheritors of the Trail's violent legacy, and a stranger collection of people couldn't be invented. Arriving back in Fort Payne right on schedule, Ellis may have gained little new insight into his own past, but he brings home enough unusual experiences to chew on for 40 years to come. Peripatetic true confessions that hook the reader with their very ingenuousness--a genuine American tale. Kirkus Reviews