Cleveland expat, author and NPR contributor Scott Huler delivered an essay on the show All Things Considered a while back, not knowing that his comments would place a global trek squarely at his feet. Huler, who published a collection of Cleveland Browns essays called On Being Brown for local publisher Gray & Company a few years ago, made one simple statement on public radio -- that he had given up trying to read James Joyce's tale of Ulysses.

His very public claim landed him in a reading group "slogging through Joyce's impenetrable modern masterpiece," and also set in motion an obsession with Joyce's source material... the ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey. "It's something that's stuffed down your throat in 9th grade," Huler told Cool Cleveland from his North Carolina home. "But I never really opened my mind to [The Odyssey] at all. Once I opened my mind, I was amazed at how many great things it told me."

At the time of The Odyssey, the Everyman hero is in his mid-40s; so was Huler. As he continued to consume the epic, he found it to be as much a guidebook to the challenges of adulthood as it was about gods and monsters. And the more he read, the more compelled Huler felt to follow in the footsteps of Odysseus -- literally. Armed with a backpack of with clothes, guidebooks, and (of course) The Odyssey, Huler traveled and retraced every step. In his new book No Man's Lands, he offers up many of the life lessons and literary ruminations he experienced along the way.

Huler said that No Man's Lands was "the a sort of book that grabbed me by coat labels" once he started writing it. And the response he's received since the book was published has been really compelling. "There are three types of people I'm hearing from," Huler said. "The Joyce people want to come and talk to me about what I thought about Ulysses; Person #2 is someone who read classics in college and responds well to traditional stories... and really likes the way we tell stories to each other in this mythological context.

"In that sense, Odysseus and the Cyclops is not that different from Jack in the Beanstalk. They're exactly the same story... people who think about life in those terms know what does it mean to confront with something other than brute strength to achieve goals," Huler said.

And the third person? "They are the [people] I like talking to the most -- the people who actually have gone back to The Odyssey and re-read it, or have been inspired by reading my book and say, 'I’m going to go back.' And I like those people who say 'Because of your book, I don’t have to read The Odyssey '. It's really been fun to drag all of those people along on the journey."

Huler talks about his new book, No Man's Lands: One Man's Odyssey Through The Odyssey (Crown Publishers) and signs copies of it tonight, Wed 4/16 at 7PM, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 24519 Cedar Rd., Lyndhurst. The book follows the author's true travel adventure as he attempts to retrace Odysseus's every step -- from the ancient ruins of Troy to his ultimate destination in Ithaca. http://www.scotthuler.com. http://www.josephbeth.com.

From Cool Cleveland Managing Editor Peter Chakerian peterATcoolcleveland.com
(:divend:)