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Walking to Listen 


Review by Jim Schmid S


uch a simple idea— slow down, walk, and listen. In 2011, at age 23 Andrew Forsthoefel


set out on a walk across America with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Walt Whitman, Khalil Gibran, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and wearing a sign on his back that said, “Walking to Listen.”


The idea was to get people curious and hopefully they’d stop and share a story or a piece of advice. During his eleven months on the road he interviewed thou- sands of people and ended up with over 85 hours of interviews on audio tape.


When asked why he decided to use audio instead of video he said “It’s less intrusive, and it’s only the person’s voice. There’s something about audio/radio that gets into you. The listener can make it their own because it’s this dreamy transference of one per- son into another. You can’t see the face and so you’re sort of imagin- ing it.”


He didn’t set out to produce a radio documentary— that came much later after his walk ended when he met Jay Allison, a pro- ducer for Transom and they put together an hour-long program (give a listen at Transom.org/ 2013/walking-across-america- advice-for-young-man). Andrew walked over 4,000


to share pieces of themselves Andrew spent time reading the books he brought and mediating upon his own journey— his walk and his spiritual journey. I love all of the wisdom


people shared with him along  points of view. He met so many  race, and lifestyles and each one gave him a bit of themselves.  people he met.


 confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order  nary that infused each moment and resides in every one of us.


— ANDREW FORSTHOEFEL, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story At A Time, 2017


miles from his home in Chadds Ford, PA to New Orleans, LA and to San Francisco, CA. His goals were to learn something about himself through self-  also to learn about the lives and beliefs of the people he met along the way. Besides asking those he meets along the way


34 SPRING 2018 AmericanTrails.org


One encounter he had that stood out to me, was when he was in Georgia and told Ernest Jackson he had to get going, and Ernest asked him to wait. Ernest rushed back into his shop and came out with a walking cane and when he held it out to Andrew he said “Remember me.” With his book and podcasts that is just what Andrew is doing— remembering. While a student at Middlebury College in Vermont Andrew researched the concept of “coming of age” and how other cultures prepare their young to become adults. It’s not hard to see how this would shape the questions he asked people along the way. He would ask people what advice they might give to their twenty-three year old self. He knew that soon he’d be thirty-three, and then forty-three, and hoped people would help him through these questions and guide him into adulthood. There is something about America and the personal jour- neys taken to discover its land-


scapes and human spirit that produces great authors and great literature. While reading Walking to Listen and then lis- tening to Andrew’s podcasts I couldn’t help but be led to other books and interviewers. I found myself going back and rereading Peter Jenkin’s


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