Running from grief: you grab car keys, pack a bag, drive south. Your son is dead. The choice is dissolve here or run there, and you choose Mexico. You drive until the road ends at a hotel of other broken people. They find you even when you’re hiding. Can you outrun grief by crossing borders?

Can you escape grief by moving? Catherine Black calls it a geographic cure. Her answer comes from experience: she bused from Montreal through Mexico in the 90s, trying her own version. The novel Blessed Nowhere follows a young mother asking the same question, and discovers this: even if you want to drop out of life, people find you and need you. You can’t disappear, even when that’s exactly what you’re trying to do.

The road doesn’t solve grief. It reveals what travels with you. Black’s debut won the Guernica Prize for literary fiction, mapping the messiness of loss without easy answers. The truth: broken people scaffold together a life whether they want to or not.

Topics: running from grief, geographic cure, losing a child, Mexico literary fiction, expatriate communities GUEST: Catherine Black | @writercatblack | http://writercatblack.ca

RUNDOWN: Running from grief forms the heart of Catherine Black’s debut novel Blessed Nowhere, which won the Guernica Prize for literary fiction. Black explores whether a young mother can escape the loss of her son by driving to Mexico, and what happens when broken people find each other in unexpected places.