Hiking, Adventure, and Embodied Writing: My Conversation with Carrot Quinn

I bring you this week a completely different type of guest than I normally have on my show.

If you’re a regular reader of my newsletters, you’ll recognize the name of said guest, because I gushed about her memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail – Thru Hiking Will Break Your Heart in a recent Monday morning missive.

As luck would have it, she actually agreed to let me interview her.

My friends, get ready to meet Carrot Quinn.

Here’s the short version of her bio:

Carrot Quinn is a long-distance hiker and writer. She splits her time between Alaska and the open spaces of the western United States. She is the author of the book Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart: An Adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail and The Sunset Route: Freight Trains, Forgiveness, and Freedom on the Rails of the American West.

But the deeper story? Carrot was raised in Alaska on welfare by a schizophrenic single mother who thought that she was the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary. At fourteen Carrot was adopted by her conservative catholic grandparents, and went to highschool in a small Colorado town near the Utah border. She spent years writing and nomading all over the U.S. before hiking the Pacific Crest Trail – all 2,650 miles of it twice.

Her writing is fresh and immediate, and I enjoyed every second of this conversation.