As Twisting Asphalt enters it’s fourth year in this brave new online world, I thought perhaps it was time to shake things up just a tad. So tonight I’m excited to announce the introduction of a new feature, or in web lingo, a new category, called, ‘Sharing The Passion’, which is intended as a look at or inside how other folks view riding and the sport of motorcycling…

As some of you might recall, a little more then a month ago I posted a short review of Canadian Professor Ted Bishop’s absolutely wonderful and engaging Ducatista riding memoir titled, “Riding With Rilke”. If you read the review then you know how highly I view the book, its author and the remarkable blend of riding observations and literary magic that Ted was able to weave on the page. That’s a really nice way of saying that if you haven’t read the book yet, you really ought to check it out

So to kickstart Twisting Asphalt’s newest feature, Ted agreed to sit down and shed a little bit more light on the creative process that went on when he wrote one of the best motorcycle books ever written (imho that is…).

Twisting Asphalt: When I first picked up your book and read a bit about it on the internet, the first thought that crossed my mind was that whomever wrote this had to be a bit mad to take a Monster on a trek from Alberta to Austin. Of all the motorcycles out there - and even within the Ducati line up - the Monster isn’t exactly known as a serious touring bike. Why pick the Monster model for this kind of trip?

Ted Bishop: I wanted a bike that was a pure motorcycle, and that to me meant a light twin, no fairing. I had been rained on, once snowed on, and looked enviously at the Gold Wings in the Tim Horton’s parking lot, but I always came back to wanting to be out in the weather. I let the bike pace me. Together we sought out twisting asphalt, all the little back roads between Edmonton and Austin, but we also stopped every hour, at viewpoints, cafes, and those historical sites I’d never turned into. I’d done the non-stop cross-continent kind of trip in cars and knew I had that compulsion to Make More Miles. This time I wanted to taste each one. With its comfortably upright riding position and room for medium-sized soft bags the Monster was actually the perfect bike for the trip.

TA: A lot of riders look at Ducati motorcycles as being high maintenance machines that cost too much to repair, — yet the 2-Valve L-Twin in the Monster is one of the great engines of all time. To my way of thinking it’s nearly bullet-proof having been in production for almost 40 years in one form or another - In “Rilke” you talk about breaking the end of your brake lever during the trip, but you don’t get into the more usual maintenance such as changing the oil, the 600 mile service or the 6,000 mile service. During your journey did you face any major reliability issues or have to do any kind of maintenance?

TB: I’d heard the usual – the maintenance was frequent, difficult, and frighteningly expensive. But Brian set the carbs before I left and I didn’t do anything until I got to Austin, where I had the oil changed (and the chain replaced because of my inept tightening). Same for the ride back, the bike ran perfectly. It’s over 10 years old now and I’ve never had a problem. At a book launch the store owner gently backed into it, knocked it over and bent the foot brake, but other than that it has been fine.

TA: From everything I’ve read it sounds like “Riding with Rilke” was both an adventure while you were actually riding but also an interesting journey once you were back in Alberta in terms of turning your experiences into a book. Can you walk us through how the project started and it’s numerous iterations?

TB: The book was a journey in itself. I wanted to write a book about zooming across the landscape and not admit that I was an English professor. I pitched it to a New York agent who said, politely but in effect, “There’s dozens of you guys riding across the continent and wanting to write books. What do you do for a living? How is this part of it?” I couldn’t see how.

I had written a couple of articles for Cycle Canada, one about the trip down, one about the trip back, and I wanted to get away from a conventional travel book, with its “and then…and then… and then” structure. At the same time I was trying to write an academic book about archives. None of that seemed to have anything to do with motorcycling, but then fortunately I fell on my head, broke my back, shattered my wrist, and wound up with a new appreciation for the way in which reading involves the whole body. I spent ten glorious days on morphine, dictating what I thought was fantastic prose into a little voice recorder. I dictated 50 or 60 pages of mainly crap, but out of that came some observations on reading that I was able to use.

I then spent a month at a writers’ residency at the Banff Centre, a fabulous arts centre in the Rockies where musicians, dancers, visual artists, and writers meet and work. At the dessert table I met Maria Scala, a poet who worked at Penguin, and she asked me if I’d considered writing a book. “Yes!” I said and immediately sent her my sprawling 300-page draft, my Blob-That-Ate-Chicago file, as I called it. She helped me craft a proposal for Penguin, they bought it, and we spent over a year working on it.

The hardest thing for me was getting the rhythm right, to keep the reader from getting bogged down in either books or bikes (I went on and on about Herb Harris and his Vincents, and on and on about James Joyce and theories of archives); Maria helped with that and also drew out more about Hsing. It was at her instigation that I coughed up the episode about the yoghurt, and that’s one of the passages readers have commented on the most.

TA: There’s a scene in the book where you describe what it was like to switch from writing for an academic audience to a query letter for Cycle Canada - what made that so difficult? And once Cycle Canada called back and said, we want to publish this, who did you see your audience being comprised of?

TB: I love semicolons. One’s good, two’s better. You can stretch your sentences out and add all kinds of stuff. But for magazine writing that is going into a three-column grid those sentences will run half-way down the page. Two of my favourite writers are motorcycle journalists – Neil Graham in Canada and Peter Egan in the States – and I knew I didn’t have to write down to my audience but I did have to write shorter.

Also you have to render the experience, not just explain it. In the book for me as an academic the hardest thing was giving up footnotes. We want to show readers what we’ve read, or how so-and-so, though worthy, has in fact missed the point, or to emphasize what, exactly, the reader should think about something. Without footnotes you’re working without a net. You just have to trust that the reader will get it.

TA: One of the great attractions I found to “Riding with Rilke” as I read it was the combination of how you described your adventure set against a backdrop of famous literature and fascinating nuggets of local history — where did all those bits come from? Did you discover them on the way or did you investigate them once you returned to Alberta?

TB: A travel writer once told me to pick up and save all those pamphlets for local tourist attractions. Once you’re back home they may spark something. So I did, and every time I stopped I also bought a local paper, read the front page stories and the letters columns, and made notes. Somebody once said, “Travel writing is 20% on the road and 80% in the library”. Maybe it was 10% on the road. I knew something about D. H. Lawrence before I went, but once I was back I wound up reading five or six books about him and the writers in Taos during that period (which developed into another big chunk that Maria made me trim). No matter how good a writer you are, your road journal is going to be just that, a journal. What thickens the broth is the work you do afterward.

TA: While we’re on the subject of tidbits — Where on earth did you come up with the “eleven people a year are killed by vending machines” factoid?

TB: The stat on vending machine deaths I got from Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries. I don’t know if it’s true but I love it.

TA: In ‘Riding with Rilke’ you go into great depth about how other famous authors like D.H Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf worked — you even detail how an artist in New Mexico tosses items in a box to prepare himself for writing a book — but you never really describe how you go about it. What was your writing process like, both on the road and once you were back home after the accident?

TB: I knew before I went that I wanted to write an article (and even a book but I wouldn’t admit that to myself out loud), so I took a coil notebook – Comet, 3 section, made in Palestine TX – and a pen, and I wrote every day for at least an hour. If I was too bagged at night I’d write in the morning before I continued. At home, I make a coffee and write for 20 minutes with a fountain pen to get going (Parker Sonnet or Lamy Safari), and then shift to the computer. I do all my writing in the morning between 8 and 11; if I’m really on a roll I can work til 1:00, but after that I’m done. Stephen King says you should write something like 2,000 words a day. I’m a slow writer: if I get 750 words in a day, 3 typewritten pages, that’s good.

Some passages, like the rant about yoghurt, just come, but usually I have to revise a lot. The novelist Greg Hollingshead says if he can’t think of a good phrase he’ll put in a cliché and go back and ‘excavate’ it later. That’s what I try to do.

Ducati Canada gave me a new Monster to ride to Texas for the Austin launch of the U.S. edition and I carried a Panasonic Toughbook in my seat bag, which was handy, but it also gave me internet access and email is the death of writing. I try never to open my browser before noon.

TA: Switching gears, in the beginning of the book you go into great detail about where your attraction to Ducati’s came from. As I recall your brother Lloyd bought a Ducati 250cc Mach 1 and it was the memory of riding that bike that got you back into Ducati’s later on - yet the Mach 1 is a drastically different beast then the Monster, motorcycles having evolved quite a bit from then to now - what connects the two for you?

TB: The Mach 1 and the Monster? Lightness and grace, style and sound.

TA: Alright, so last question - What bike is currently sitting in your garage?

TB: The same Monster is still sitting in my garage. I enjoyed riding the 2007 S2R to Texas but turned it in without regret. I wanted to want it, and wanted to want the GT 1000 and the MultiStrada I test drove, but my old bike still gives me a kick. What I really want alongside it is a 250 Mach 1.