Mark Blondin

WRITER · PHOTOGRAPHER

Vila do Conde, PORTUGAL

"I left the US looking for a different vantage point. I found it."

I'm an American writer. In 1996, my family drove out of Michigan in a motorhome and spent nine months filing one of the first real-time travel journals on the web — it's still live, unedited, at blondins.com. Twelve years in Carlsbad, California, came next. Then seven years without a fixed address — three continents, a long run of rented rooms — before settling in Vila do Conde, on the coast north of Porto.

I write political essays and travel memoir. The essays go after how American systems actually run once you stop taking the official account on faith: the two-trillion-dollar business of managing American illness instead of ending it, a retirement system that froze the SSI asset limit at $2,000 in 1989 and never touched it again, the politics of belonging that added a face or two to the boardroom while the rent soared. The travel writing is the other side of the same window — what the country looks like once you're outside it. I check the numbers. I name the names. Nothing gets a pass it hasn't earned.

Recent work has appeared in The Humanist; earlier work in HuffPost. I'm writing a book about the American medical-industrial complex and a memoir about the leaving.

New essays go up first at Material Witness, my newsletter. It's the best place to read me, and the only place to read me first.

THREE BODIES OF WORK

PHOTOGRAPHY

Three continents. One camera. The world as it looked.

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