Looking for God and a good literary agent

It’s a real place, deep inside Ontario’s wilderness, where moose, bears, and memory mingle. It’s also a place where I go to escape Iranian missiles, Wi-Fi, a midlife crisis, and the endless scroll of outrage on the internet.

After decades of reporting from the Middle East, it’s where I go to clean the timeline. Putting myself alone there with two kids, some years ago I went looking for answers about myself. Instead, I found a pyramid in the forest built by a porn baron, a gnome in snowmobile boot liners, and ghost dogs.

Now I’m back in Jaffa, hearing the muezzin rise over Jaffa’s rooftops (which I love), thinking about how landscapes in my life—the desert of Sinai, the intensity of Israel, and the forest, all carry the same question: Maybe redemption begins when we stop claiming the land, and start caring for it.

Bearland, the book I’ve been writing for the last year, tries to answer that question through an ecological lens. It’s a true story dressed in myth: an autobiographical, semi-nonfiction journey between war and wilderness, science and spirit, flesh and faith. It’s about finding holiness not in temples or treaties, but in mud, fur, water, and the quiet pulse of the divine, where God breathes through the wind.

In Bearland, I’m joined by an unlikely troupe of New Age prophets: Peter the Gnome, King David the wandering cook, Vosu, the midwife, and Raven, a water witch from the future. They whisper to me through dream and memories that maybe home isn’t a place we find at all—maybe it’s the land that finds us?

So here I am in the Holy Land, looking for a literary agent. Someone not afraid of a memoir that crosses continents, mixes journalism with mysticism, and sometimes lets the trees do the talking. If you know one, I’m listening. From here. From there. Or maybe from somewhere deep in Bearland.