Wolf Interviews: M. E. Rothwell
Traveling Europe and East Asia birthed a deep interest and love of history for me, and so Cosmographia seems like such a perfect marriage of history and geography. How did Cosmographia come about?
It came about part accident, part design. My girlfriend and I left London to travel around Europe and I decided to set up a substack (then called Mzungu) to document our travels. After a couple of months of sending emails out to friends and family and getting really kind feedback, I decided to see if I couldn't attract a wider audience. About six months in I branched out from writing just about what we were doing and started encompassing more and more of my other interests - history, art, literature, cartography etc. Now I barely write about our travels at all, and instead it has come to take on a scope more like the cosmographic projects of old - which is about when I changed the name to Cosmographia.
How much research goes into a post? How do you begin the researching process? Who are some of your favorite historians and/or travel writers?
Haha this is a difficult question to answer as it really depends. Sometimes I can research a post for a few hours and find enough interesting material to write a full post on it and everything is good. Other times I can spend days and days reading something only to find out there was nothing interesting in that area. In a post a couple of months ago I felt compared to share with the readers that I'd spent 6 hours reading a really boring book about the gold prospecting in 19th century South Africa only for it to inform about two sentences worth of the finished post. But that's part of why I love writing it, I never know which rabbit-hole is going to lead somewhere interesting, and the fun is in the chase.
In terms of modern historians, I love Tom Holland, Simon Montefiore, Dominic Sandbrook, Diarmaid MacCulloch, and David Olusoga. If I'm writing about a place with really deep history, I'll also have a look at what the ancient polymaths had to say about a place - figures like Claudius Ptolemy, Herodotus, Strabo, Eratosthenes or later on people like Sebastian Münster, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, or Peter Heylin. For travel writers I'm rather obsessed with Bruce Chatwin, Robert Byron, and Sophie Roberts.
What is your favorite city that you've traveled to? What about that place stood out to you?
Vienna. I am obsessed with Vienna. The city has two nicknames: the City of Music and the City of Dreams.
It’s the City of Music because over the centuries it has been called home by so many of the great composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss I, Strauss II, Haydn, Brahms, Schubert, Bruckner, Liszt, Mahler, Lehár…on and on the list goes.
It’s the City of Dreams because it was where Sigmund Freud developed his theories of psychoanalysis and wrote his famous treatise, The Interpretation of Dreams. I like to think of it as my personal city of dreams as I’ve wanted to live here for a long time. I got the chance to spend a month there last year, and we're returning for two more months in 2024. It is full of stunning 18-19th century architecture, it's spotlessly clean, has incredible cafes (imagine like a cathedral but for coffee), public transport is incredible, and the Viennese themselves are wonderful people. If it wasn't for Brexit making the visa situation difficult, think my girlfriend and I would move there.
Your Moleskine Notebooks offer an artistic representation of a place for free, whereas Atlas Cultura is a deep dive into a specific place for paying subscribers. I've always thought this was a clever way to present an appetizer and main course of what you're offering. Can you talk a bit about this? Was it a deliberate decision? Did it evolve naturally?
I became quite interested in the concept of what it means to "know a place." Travel is, in essence, the futile attempt to gain an understanding of what a place is, what it represents to us, and how it came to occupy that role. I say futile because I believe it impossible to truly know a place, whether you're a lifetime resident or a passing traveller. However, we can circle closer and closer to an approximation of a city, a land, a country, if we can see it from multiple perspectives. The idea for the Moleskine Notebooks came out of this concept -- can I gain an understanding of a place by looking at it through a few different lenses: art; poetry; cartography; literature; photography; and history? Readers really responded well to this concept, so it made sense from there to try to go a bit deeper. Atlas Cultura was born out of really diving much deeper into the individual sections of the Moleskine Notebooks, and it seemed to fit really well with the Substack model to paywall this part of the newsletter.
Of all the places you've researched in the last 18 months, what are some of the most surprising/interesting facts you've uncovered?
I'm rather obsessed with old maps. One of my absolute favourite parts of writing Cosmographia is tracking the development of cartography and seeing how our understanding of the world changed over time. To decode some of these old maps you have to know some of the old place names, and various legends that are associated with them. For example, the Greek word "Aethiopia" (which has the rather uncomfortable translation of the "Land of Burnt Faces") can refer to the area just south of Egypt, or in fact to anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. There was a figure in Greek mythology, King Memnon of Aethiopia, who supposedly fought in the Trojan War, and so his name appears on maps of Africa all the way up to the Middle Ages. Likewise, "Tataria'' (Land of the Tartars) was a sort of handwavey gesture to anywhere in Siberia or the Russian Far East, but wasn't a real polity or country. Then you get into trying to guess at old cartographic legends like the Mountains of the Moon (legendary source of the Nile), or the Great Stone Tower (which Ptolemy had as the mid-point on the Silk Road) or the obsession with the lost continent of Terra Australis. I accept this is probably a niche interest, but I love trying to piece together clues from old geography treatises, myths, and the centuries of maps they inspired.
I also love things like this.
You also began another substack that's more community focused called The Books That Made Us. Can you talk about how this came about and how it's grown?
After Cormac McCarthy died earlier this year, I reread his masterpiece Blood Meridian, and it occurred to me that this would be in my Top 5 books that had the biggest impact on me. I posted a question on Substack Notes (which had just launched) about this idea - what are your foundational books, the books you feel made you who you are today? The Note kinda blew up and I realised there might be enough there to create a community around this premise. I created The Books That Made Us substack the next day and put out a request to the substack writers community for essays to host on this topic. It really caught on. Today, we're around six months in and we've hosted about twenty or so essays, garnered two thousand readers, and even started hosting some short story fiction.
My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.
Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants
Some free books for your trouble:
Very interesting, thanks for this interview.
M.E Rothwell is one of my favourite Substackers hereon Substack! Glad to hear you interviewed him!