Last Year in Cemetery Travel

Hollywood Forever by Loren Rhoads.

This blog suffered this year while I concentrated on the writing and release of my space opera trilogy.  I only managed to put up 26 blog posts (including this one), but I am really proud of some of the other advances Cemetery Travel made.

Death’s Garden:

I started publishing the first essays that will become Death’s Garden Revisited.  Thirteen of them have gone up so far, ranging from California to Paris, Missouri to London, and Oregon to Venezuela. The essays have explored losing family members to becoming inspired to lead tours or actually rescuing a graveyard from the brink of destruction. Stay tuned! I have some great things lined up for 2016.

Wish You Were Here:

My book of cemetery travel essays was chosen by two book clubs as their book of the month.

Cypress Lawn Book Club
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma, California
I fielded questions from the Cypress Lawn Book Club in person. That was a lot of fun.

Morbid Curiosity Book Club
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
BAKA Cafe Gallery Lounge, Toronto, Ontario
This one hasn’t happened yet, but I’m really excited that the club chose my book. You can read along with them — and follow their upcoming selections — at Meetup.com.

Press:

Mental Floss chose Cemetery Travel as one of 9 Niche Blogs to Brighten Your Winter last January.

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Irene S. Levine for the Chicago Tribune for an extensive piece she wrote about adding cemeteries to your summer travel. It has the wonderful title “Nothing like a Cemetery to Enliven a Trip.”

I did my first Skype interview with Casey Jarman, author of the upcoming Death: An Oral History, which will be out in August 2016 from Zest Books.

I was interviewed by a freelancer for the Mumbai Free Press Journal about the prevalence of tombstone tourism, but the story hasn’t appeared yet. I’m still hopeful.

Finally, Cemetery Travel was quoted as a source in KQED’s Bay Curious article “Why Are So Many Dead People in Colma? And So Few in San Francisco?” You can read it here.

Guest Blogging:

Emerian Rich invited me to kidnap the Horror Addicts blog for a couple of days, so I wrote about the graves of horror’s forefathers: part one, part two, part three.

The Horror Writers Association hosted its annual Halloween Haunts blog series, so of course I wrote about Graveyard Horrors:  http://horror.org/halloween-haunts-graveyard-horrors-by-loren-rhoads/

Podcasting:

Morbid Curiosity and Cemetery Travel were featured on the amazing, long-running Finch Files podcast: http://www.finchfiles.net/podcasts/2015/10/26/finch-files-halloween-15-episode-28