for the members of Trio Kavkasia to live and study music in the Republic of Georgia in the 1990s — the critical, chaotic decade in which Georgians saw their lives uprooted by civil war and economic collapse as the country staggered into the post-Soviet world?
One of us, Stuart, has published a book-length memoir, SIX REASONS TO TRAVEL: an American Singer in Georgia, about his and the trio's experiences in Georgia, focusing on the mid-Nineties but stretching across thirty-five years of his ongoing engagement with Georgian music and culture, from 1978 to 2013. Six Reasons to Travel is available from Bertie Stanhope Press.
In addition, several excerpts from Six Reasons to Travel have been published in online creative nonfiction magazines. Click on any of the titles below to open the link for a preview of what the rest of the book is like.
in the July 2013 issue of Hippocampus Magazine
The trio's field-research expedition to the mountains of Guria in 1997. (No actual song collecting is accomplished in the course of the excerpt.)
in the August 2013 issue of Hippocampus Magazine
Some of the grimmer aspects of daily life in Georgia, especially in Tbilisi, in 1995.
in the Oct/Nov 2013 issue of Eclectica Magazine,
in which Stuart was featured as the "Spotlight On" author
A weekend hunting trip to remote eastern Kakheti in 1995.
Another excerpt from SIX REASONS TO TRAVEL appeared in print only, not online:
“Immigrants”
in Harvard Review Number 51 (December 2017).
A Georgian singer lands in Brooklyn, hoping to sing the blues with James Brown.
