Nowhere Slow: Eleven Years in Micronesia

The Bygone Bureau presents Nowhere Slow: Eleven Years in Micronesia, Jonathan Gourlay's memoir of cultural confusion, hilarity and tragedy, and a decade of soul-searching.

In 1997, Jonathan Gourlay travels to the island of Pohnpei, in the western Pacific Ocean, to teach English at the College of Micronesia. He is a stranger in a strange land, unfamiliar with the language, the intricacies of Pohnpeian social life, and most of all, the mildly psychotropic drink sakau. But the society that he blunders into eventually becomes his adopted home for the next eleven years. Along the way, Gourlay endures plenty of minor embarrassments and one major heartbreak: his whirlwind marriage to a Pohnpeian woman comes apart and ends in tragedy, leaving him to pick up the pieces of his life and to raise his daughter alone.