Show Notes
Cobblestones. Cafes. The smell of baguettes hits you as you walk into a warm boulangerie on a rainy morning. An open notebook on a chequered tablecloth, an old-style pen, and a café au lait at the ready. Paris in April. They even wrote a song about it. Paris is probably the most pre-imagined city on earth, and the so-called Lost Generation, the writers and artists who flooded here after the First World War, wrote a version of the city that most of us still carry with us. Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was the book that launched a thousand tote bags. But that version of 1920s Paris with its champagne, café feuds, and glamorised poverty (trust funds and inheritances conveniently hidden) is only one man’s memories, written down and romanticised decades after the fact. In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we take a look at three writers who were all in Paris at the same time, but writing about three different cities. Jean Rhys was a writer from Dominica. Later, she would become famous for her 1966 classic, Wide Sargasso Sea, but in 1920s Paris, she was a struggling writer with little money and a husband in a French prison. George Orwell was there, too. Washing dishes at a fancy hotel and scraping by in a rundown hotel just 500 metres from where Hemingway lived. We trace their haunts from the Place de la Contrescarpe to Montparnasse, from Jean Rhys’ beautifully evocative Left Bank and Other Stories to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, whose stories of crowded, profane kitchens would be among the inspirations for Anthony Bourdain and his famous book Kitchen Confidential. And we offer a Paris travel guide for those on their way to France or just dreaming of a trip. Sarah and Jeremiah walk you from the Latin Quarter to the Luxembourg Gardens.
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In this encore episode of By Their Own Compass, we explore the extraordinary journey of Sacagawea, a nursing teenager who traveled across North America with the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Corps of Discovery from 1805–1806. Looking beyond the legend, we examine her role as a traveler, cultural mediator, and Native American woman navigating survival, motherhood, and agency in a rapidly changing America. Join us as we gently dismantle the stereotypes attached to Sacagawea to tell her story as a voyager and cultural pioneer learning to move between two radically different worlds. Was she the faithful guide so often portrayed in American history books? A collaborator in a process that brought devastation to Indigenous peoples across the United States? Or was Sacagawea acting for her own reasons – making the best of a situation she did not choose while doing what she believed was right for herself and her newborn child? Born into a world shaped by seasonal migrations and annual rhythms, she was a member of the Shoshone tribe, part of a complex network of exchange, cooperation, and conflict with neighboring peoples, including the Hidatsa, Mandan, Sioux, and Crow – each with its own languages, customs, and political realities. Sacagawea understood this world instinctively, one the expedition did not. Along the way, she repeatedly saved Lewis and Clark from disaster, asserted herself when it mattered – insisting on being allowed to see a beached whale – and experienced deep emotion, including a brief reunion with her long-lost brother, only to be forced to leave him again. This is the story of a Native American woman negotiating colonial expansion, motherhood on the move, and the power of finding your voice in a world being reshaped around you.
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