Imagine hailing Odysseus' ship from a passing Jet-Ski to let him know there's a lovely ferry to Ithaca he can catch just around the corner, full dinner service, every hour on the hour. It'd save a lot of hassle, sure, but am I so obtuse in thinking there's some intrinsic worth to the odyssey itself?

Bookcrawling London

Readers of Dale McGowan’s nonfiction often find themselves treading the razor between the ridiculous and the sublime, and in bare feet at that. Whether trolling ancient bookshops ("Bookcrawling London"), critiquing American politics ("An American Liberal in London"), running from killer cows ("On Crossing a Field"), bemoaning the national anthem ("The Case Against the Star-Spangled Banner"), championing liberal education ("In Praise of Breadth"), interviewing the beautiful people ("The Feast of Saint Ursula") or chuckling at the endless human capacity for self-deception ("Tempting Fate"), McGowan is at turns blithely optimistic and hilariously despairing. Beneath even his more serious efforts runs a current of irreverence, threatening to upset the applecart like a whale surfacing under a mixed metaphor.

His articles, essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Georgia Review, Circle Magazine, GoodReading, Maelstrom, Family Issues, Colleague, and American Music Teacher.

Dr. McGowan is currently at work on two nonfiction books. Why Does Barber’s Adagio Break My Heart? explains the ways in which music achieves its astonishing emotional power. It begins with a witty, fast-moving and non-technical jaunt through the elements of music and ends with a bar-by-bar exploration of Samuel Barber’s deeply moving Adagio for Strings, a work of such resonant grief that it has been called “our national anthem of mourning.” By the end, the reader knows not just that the Adagio breaks our hearts, but why and how it does.

Northing at Midlife is a work of narrative nonfiction based on the author’s attempt to have himself a midlife crisis while hiking the legendary long-distance paths of Great Britain. The reader follows the bewildered narrator from the mollycoddling sidewalks of the Thames River Path to the barren wilds of Rannoch Moor in the Western Highlands of Scotland, edge-walking the 600-foot cliffs of High Cup Nick in the dark, going fully airborne in a windstorm, braving Highland cattle (picture a shaggy minivan with four-foot horns above the windshield), even facing the perils of the Farting Host of Barney Castle, all in the interest of… Well, there’s the rub. Why does a person do these things, anyway?