April 24, 2026
Most travel works like this: you sign up, you pay, you show up in a foreign country, and you spend the first two days figuring out who you’re compatible with. Sometimes that works out. Sometimes you spend a week being polite to people you have nothing in common with, and you come home wondering why you did it.
I built the arc model to solve that problem. And it turns out it solves a few others I wasn’t expecting.
Every hosted trip I run includes a five-month book club arc before departure. Five books. Five months. Two calls per month — one public, one private.
The public call is open to anyone: readers who want to follow along, people considering the trip, book club members who aren’t sure if they’re going yet. No charge, no commitment. Come once or come every month.
The private call is for the cohort — the eight women who are actually getting on the plane. These calls are where the real bonding happens. By the time we’re in month three, people are finishing each other’s sentences.
The arc starts five months before the trip. The cohort locks when the arc begins — that’s the real booking deadline, not the departure date.
The obvious thing it changes: you’re not walking into a foreign country with strangers. By the time you arrive, you’ve spent five months reading and talking with these eight women. You know who makes the sharpest observations about a novel’s structure. You know who always notices the thing everyone else missed. You know who will want to stay on deck with a book and who will want to go ashore in every port.
The less obvious thing: the reading lands differently when you do it as a group over time. A book you’d read in a week and mostly forget becomes something you’ve been sitting with for a month, that you’ve argued about on two calls, that you’ve had time to connect to other books on the list. By the time you arrive at the destination, the reading is part of you in a way that single-sitting reading rarely is.
And then there’s the finale. The last book on the list, we finish in-destination. The final discussion happens in Yorkshire, or on deck in the Caribbean, or in the long evening light of the west of Ireland. Not in someone’s living room. In the place the book was made for.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s what actually happens.
The public calls do something the private calls can’t: they grow the list. People who follow along for a few months and don’t book the current trip often book the next one. They’ve already been reading with the group. They know what it’s like. The FOMO is real.
The private calls do something the public calls can’t: they let the cohort go deeper. There are conversations you can only have in a closed room — about the difficult material on the reading list, about personal connections to the books, about what you’re hoping to get out of the trip. Those conversations are what make the week in Yorkshire feel like a reunion rather than a first meeting.
Every arc reading list is built specifically for the destination. Not the canonical titles everyone has already read. Not the most famous book set in that country. The books that reward the kind of attention five months allows — books worth arguing about, books where the landscape matters, books where you notice something different in month five than you did in month one.
For Yorkshire: Fiona Mozley, Jon McGregor, Pat Barker. For the west of Ireland: Edna O’Brien, Claire Keegan, Anne Enright. For the Caribbean: Jean Rhys, Monique Roffey, Jamaica Kincaid. The list is always underread, never assigned.
The arc is not optional for the cohort. It’s the point. You can join a trip without the arc — trip-only spots may be available after the cohort locks — but you’ll arrive without five months of shared reading behind you, and you’ll feel the difference.
If you want the full thing, the real deadline isn’t the departure date. It’s the month the arc begins.
Current arcs opening:
Trip announcements, curated reading lists, and the occasional dispatch — before anyone else.