Forthcoming in June 2025
In Elsewhere, author and photographer Katherine Oktober Matthews examines her compulsion to travel—a fundamental need to be moving. She lays bare her journey as a mixed-format essay and journal written on the road, made even more personal through her contemplative photos, quietly coursing with an underlying conflict.
Flitting between cities and blinking back and forth through time, Elsewhere pulsates with a nebulous sense of home and the deep wish to belong.
In this innovative personal essay of words and photos, raw and insightful of a time and a generation, Matthews traces the widening recognition that the one thing a wanderer takes with her everywhere is herself.
Elsewhere is forthcoming as a trade edition from Leaping Man in 2025 and is currently available for pre-order at bookstores worldwide, among others on Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Target. In the UK, that could be Waterstones or WHSmith, and in the Netherlands check American Book Center.
What Readers Are Saying about Elsewhere
“Loneliness and beauty travel together in Elsewhere, which pairs bleakly romantic memoir with evocative photos to narrate the experience of an American abroad. In these brief stories Matthews meets old friends, mourns lost loves, and stays on the move, taking haunting pictures as she goes. The effect is compelling, memorable, and recognizable to anyone who’s ever tried to find herself by leaving home.” – Julie Phillips, author of The Baby on the Fire Escape and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
“Katherine Oktober Matthews has created an exceptional stew of words and photographs in her new monograph, Elsewhere. She has packed a suitcase of experiences, documented with profound seeing and thinking, as she navigates unfamiliar terrains alone. Solo travel creates a particular space for self-reflection, and in Matthew’s experience, an internal dialogue that looks inward, while at the same time observing small details and moments through her camera. This unique combination of storytelling, with two parallel expressions that poetically speak to elevating and expanding the visual experience, remind us that travel is not to find yourself, but to remember who you’ve been all along.” – Aline Smithson, Founder of Lenscratch, Artist and Educator
“The photos and text of Katherine Matthews’ Elsewhere stage the travelogue as a journey into the peripheries and extremities of the self. Jaded exchanges in dive bars and highway diners, blurred and shadowy images of lampshades, clouds, roads and parklands all assume a strange and exhilarating immediacy and beauty. A book to pore over again and again.” – Josh Cohen, psychoanalyst and author of All the Rage
“In her on-the-road, personal essay Elsewhere, Katherine Matthews processes intense heartbreak through introspective prose and poetic photographs. Traversing both internal and external landscapes and time, she reaches out and draws us into a moving constellation of connections with men and women, roads and places. Grainy black-and-white images add a visual, jazzy beat to the book, emphasizing the non-linear, repetitive, and enclosed nature of memory—and of being.” – Elizabeth Clark Libert, Photo-based artist and author of Boy Crazy