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My Year Without Matches by Claire Dunn: book review

 


 

My Year Without Matches: Escaping the City in Search of the Wild (2014) is a memoir of a quiet life.

 

The Australian freelance journalist leaves the city to attend a year-long residential  wilderness skills survival program – no phone calls, no emails, and only the barest of essentials. Various instructors join the wilderness program’s organizers Kate and Sam, to work with the author and five other participants: Nikki, Cloe, Ryan, Dan, and Shaun to help them survive during the year. They can quit at any time.

 

First, Claire Dunn needs to build a shelter, get water, make a fire without matches, and find food. After she makes a temporary shelter that leaks, she needs to ‘give some serious thought to a real shelter.’ Claire and her fellow participants are not on their own – they have other people for support, and they have workshops. And later, the local community is curious about what they are doing.

 

Over the year, she describes the changing seasons and the changing landscape – physically and emotionally, as she overcomes her fears and sees life from a different perspective. How is she different at the end of her quest?

 

There is some wisdom about the land, and some harmony with the animals, but not as comprehensive as I expected. This is a nature-based journey of self: partially interesting and partially informative.






 

 

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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