Jill Franks is a professor of English and Film Studies whose scholarly books treat subjects such as film comedians, the British women's movement, and modernists' work on islands. This is her first non-scholarly work, yet her vocation is never far off the page: she enjoys literature too much to leave it out. After completing the Camino de Santiago in 2012 she vowed to hike across a different country every spring. She managed five more treks-across southern France, the Netherlands, England, Ireland, and Scotland-before her bad knee and the urge to write got in the way. She does, however, plan to rise like the phoenix and find one day another trail, another country.