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In 2015 Naomi Steinberg completed a 382 day adventure, covering 55,965 kilometers around the world by road and rail, land and sea, performing a playful and profound one-woman show that questions the very nature of modern connection.
In a moment of increasing xenophobia, Steinberg’s precarious journey by cargo ship, rail, car and foot was an exploration of how we can develop an ethical and truly global sense of belonging – regardless of where in the world we find ourselves.
Performing 37 shows in locations across four continents, Goosefeather is an empowering examination of what it takes to make a story translate across disparate cultures. Steinberg provides a humorous and refreshingly honest look at what it really takes to bring a show across 18 borders and survive a successful year on a highly unconventional road.
Beautifully written, Steinberg proves her credentials as an engaging storyteller, bringing to life the red clay of rural France, the wild green of California, the winding rice fields of Japan – and sharing the local stories that help each culture make sense of the place that shapes them. The result is an immersive, nuanced reimagining of geographies both familiar and foreign, that will invite you to seek out new stories in even the most familiar spaces.
Dear Reader,
Some of you reading these words are people I know, with whom I have shared some space-time. Some of you now reading will never have met me. We are not familiar kin.
Let it be known therefore, that I cultivate an artistic temperament. I feel big feelings and have standards upon which I like to reflect academically; I keep an impossibly high bar for myself; worry about not doing enough; sometimes anguish and languish; am always also passionately dreaming, scheming, making, playing, doing, being, and celebrating.
Let us thus calibrate and set to having a good time.
As I write these paragraphs, I can look at the wall above my desk to where a map of planet Earth hangs. Upon its laminated surface my mother tracked Goosefeather’s trajectory around the planet by land and sea. She used a Jiffy marker to do so. My heart opens wide when acknowledging the vast network of creatures and landscapes I met along that thin ink line.
READ MOREThe long process of bringing words to lived experience crossed valleys and peaks. With sweat and joy did I discover these sentences now set to page. Perhaps I will be happy to see you when you choose to read this book, thus conjuring me. Certainly at that time I will lift up, off the page, to tell you stories of how once-upon-a-time, long long ago, when on a cartographic adventure...
Come, I propose a toast to this, our beautiful world.
Best and kindest regards,
COLLAPSEAlma Lee, Founder and First Artistic Director of the Vancouver Int'l Writers Festival wrote:"Goosefeather is a vibrant landscape of story, latitude and longitude intertwined with the quirky personalities and serendipitous encounters that present themselves when we open to adventure. Naomi Eliana Pommier Steinberg has written a delightful travelogue depicting her slow journey around the planet performing her signature one-woman show, Goosefeather. Steinberg, one of Canada's most renowned storytellers, has written her own story in a playful and engaging tale, as much performance as it is a journey-memoir of an artist who opens herself to possibility."
"A wonderful world adventure. A testament to making and keeping connections. An open hearted, clear, loving and exciting story of one woman's journey across our planet."
