Wisdom from a lifetime on the road

If I Was a Highway (cloth)

Michael Ventura, with foreword by Dan Flores and photographs by Butch Hancock; preface by Andy Wilkinson

Michael Ventura’s owned only one car his entire life: a green ’69 Chevy Malibu. Its wheels have crisscrossed the American landscape over more miles than a round trip to the moon. From Times Square to Terlingua, from Maine to Los Angeles, from Austin to Deadwood, Ventura has chronicled the continent in “a kind of switchback journey in image and thought.” His essays convey a tactile and intimate relationship with land and people—and of course the car.

Ventura’s distinctive voice and vision are familiar to readers of the Austin Chronicle (where many of these pieces first appeared), as well the Austin Sun, Psychotherapy Networker, and LA Weekly. In this collection, its title borrowed from a Butch Hancock song, the essays alternate lanes with Hancock’s evocative black-and-white photographs. Slowing down to take notice of a makeshift shrine in the Texas Panhandle or zipping along the New York Thruway before dawn, Ventura captures the details that make us think profoundly about work, music, poverty, beauty, our home on the planet and in the universe. About volcanoes and the Very Large Array. About friends and companions. About gods and goddesses and God.

With Lubbock, Texas, and the Southwest as the book’s home base, If I Was a Highway roams widely and freely as Ventura takes readers on an unforgettable journey not only into the country but into the soul.

If you’re searching for the forgotten soul of America, you’ll find no better guidebook than Michael Ventura’s deep, passionate, endlessly readable bulletins from the frontlines of our national psyche. . . . For him, the highway isn’t just a road—it’s a philosophy. —John Powers, critic at large, NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross

Michael Ventura knows shit. He hears things, too. He can write like a musician. He understands that from the fringe you can see more of the whole picture. —John Densmore, author of Riders on the Storm

Georges Bataille once wrote of “the shame of a generation whose rebels are afraid of the noise of their own words.” As much as any writer today, and far more than most, Michael Ventura is not afraid of his. —Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train and editor of A New Literary History of America

Praise for Michael Ventura’s Letters at 3AM

Michael Ventura fights for the complicated world we have inherited, fights for quality, intensity, madness, work, education, art, risk. —Robert Bly

The work of an uncompromising spirit. —Andrei Codrescu

Michael Ventura writes with the body and brilliance of someone who lives solidly in this world and yet sees the theater that is invisible to most of us. —Thomas Moore

Journalist, poet, and novelist Michael Ventura is the author of more than 1,000 articles and eight books, including Letters at 3AM: Reports on Endarkment and Cassavetes Directs. A native of New York City, he has spent most of his writing life on the West Coast and now lives in Lubbock, Texas.

Architect, photographer, TV producer, and singer-songwriter Butch Hancock has recorded more than fifteen albums. Born in Lubbock, Texas, he now lives in Terlingua, in Texas’s Big Bend region.

Writer and professor Dan Flores, author of Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains, divides his time between the Bitterroot Valley of Montana and the Galisteo River Valley outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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