Greg Sidaway
Great Stories
I’m Greg. I love to tell stories.
Give me a quiet afternoon and I will inevitably find my way to my laptop and start typing a story. Short fiction, screenplay, novel; life-writing, fantasy, literary, horror - you name it!
My childhood passion for Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings led me to pursue an English Literature degree at Exeter College, Oxford. At uni, I collaborated with like-minded creatives who loved storytelling as much as I did. Behind the scenes and as an actor, I learned from them and with them on six short films and three theatre productions.
Since March 2019, I have contributed a monthly column (‘Teenage Focus’, ‘Gregory’s World’) for up to six local newspapers, including Pershore Times, adapting my experiences - uni life, driving tests, McDonalds shifts etc. - into over eighty entertaining articles and attracting a dedicated audience.
In July 2025, I took on the role of Editorial Assistant at Hughes & Company Printers in Pershore, assembling six local papers and gaining a stronger, practical understanding of journalism and print media.
Hello!
On the Trail of
Cormac McCarthy
New Orleans - Santa Fe, July ‘26
Cormac McCarthy has been one of my all-time favourite authors since I read Blood Meridian (1985) in 2022. I didn’t pretend to fully understand the novel (I still don’t), but I was keen to know more about his work. The Coen Brothers’ Academy Award-winning film adaptation of No Country for Old Men (2005) had been my earliest introduction to McCarthy, so I thought I’d carry on from there. I asked for a copy of No Country for Christmas. Rewatching the film and reading the novel – relentless, break-neck, my favourite McCarthy work – provided a perfect jumping-on point for me as a new fan. Next, came The Road (2006) and I never looked back.
I discovered McCarthy during my first year at uni. This meant I could bring a more critical eye and greater contextual knowledge to his texts. I enjoyed them more than I would have done beforehand, finding ways to integrate them into my set essays on Twentieth and Twenty-First Century literature. Cormac McCarthy also passed away on 13th June 2023, at the end of my first year.
The fun I had exploring his work during my early months of study meant that, later, when it came time to choose a topic for my final dissertation, a topic I wanted to explore over nearly twelve months of extended research, I could think of nothing else. I was also keen to tread new academic ground. I chose McCarthy’s 2022 novel, The Passenger, as the basis of my study into how he uses symbols to explore the unconscious mind and humanity’s understanding of itself. After a year of research, I produced an 8000-word essay which I am very proud of.
A year after graduating, I embarked with my sister on a McCarthy-themed road trip around Louisiana, Texas and New Mexico. These U.S. states heavily influence his later works, providing stark environments for his characters to traverse in their search for meaning. Free of academia and deadlines, I experienced these southern states of America as a pure fan and admirer of a phenomenal writer’s work. It was awesome!
4th July – New Orleans
Where better to start than Nola? The Big Easy and its surroundings are everywhere in The Passenger, from Jackson Square to the Napoleon House restaurant, to nearby Algiers and Lake Pontchartrain. I visited Faulkner House Books on Pirate’s Alley and couldn’t resist buying a hardcover American edition of The Passenger to mark the occasion.
“This has one of the best opening hooks I’ve ever read,” the lady there told me as I bought the book. When I mentioned that I’d based my uni dissertation on The Passenger, she added: “Cormac used to visit here.”
There was something quite exciting about the way she referred to him on a first-name basis. It was so sad he was no longer with us, she went on, she had so many questions to ask him about The Passenger. It was crazy to imagine McCarthy perusing this exact shop, gathering inspiration for the very book I was now buying.
We rounded off the day with a visit to the Napoleon House restaurant, where Bobby Western enjoys a beer with Long John, Bianca, Brat, Count Seals and Darling Dave in Chapter One. I enjoyed a delicious Louisianan meal of gumbo and jambalaya, before taking in the Independence Day fireworks over the Mississippi. Happy Fourth, y’all!
12th July – San Marcos, Texas
We drove on. Next stop: the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, home to an extensive archive of McCarthy’s manuscripts and materials. Although you have to schedule an appointment in advance to gain full access to these archives, several important artefacts are on general display for the public. These included: photographs and colouring books from McCarthy’s school days, McCarthy’s personal copy of Moby-Dick, and early drafts of No Country for Old Men. Moby-Dick was McCarthy’s favourite book. In my dissertation, I identified links between Melville’s use of symbols and his belief in their communicative power, and McCarthy’s own use of motifs in The Passenger. It was really special to see the actual book that influenced McCarthy’s imaginative process and the tools he would use to articulate ideas in his own work.
My favourite document was a typewritten page where McCarthy analyses the opening line of William Butler Yeats’ poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1928): ‘That is no country for old men’. He would of course borrow this line for the title of his 2005 novel. This page of analysis was particularly interesting because it revealed his interpretation of the poem, his own understanding of the line, and therefore the key ideas and tone that informed how he wrote the novel and, in particular, his world-weary narrator, Sheriff Bell.
The best pieces in the collection were McCarthy’s Tennessee desk and famous blue lettera typewriter. To see these artefacts in the flesh was beyond cool! It was such a privilege, particularly coming from the UK, where no such collections exist.
Kingsbury, Texas
One of my favourite parts of All the Pretty Horses (1992) was hanging out with John Grady Cole and co. as they ventured through the wilderness. I particularly enjoyed the down-to-earth moments when they set up camp, lit a fire and prepared a simple meal, usually consisting of beans and tortillas. Since reading Horses, cooking ranch beans over an open fire has been on my Texas bucket-list.
I got the opportunity to finally do this when we stayed overnight in an RV in Kingsbury. The RV had its own firepit, so after picking up beans and tortilla chips at H-E-B, I foraged for kindling, lit a fire on an already sweltering evening, and cooked a pan of ranch beans. They’re very tasty, a great filling for wraps, like baked beans but more barbecue-y. I did also enjoy a Texan sausage but, unlike John Grady Cole, we used an air fryer!
14th July – Marfa, Texas
We drove on. Marfa, Texas, is a beautiful town in the south-west corner of the state, with an old railway still passing through the middle of it, surrounded by rugged mountains and desert flats. Marfa provided a stark backdrop for the Coen Brothers’ 2007 adaptation of No Country for Old Men. With the help of the fantastic website www.grahmsguide.com, I researched the location where Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) pulls over an innocent driver (Chip Love), cattle-guns him and steals his car. It was along Ranch Road 2810, south-west of Marfa. I pulled over for a photo, but I didn’t dare hang around for long!
Las Vegas, New Mexico
After a seven-hour drive north, we stayed overnight in another iconic location from the movie: the Del Rio Motel. In real life, it’s the Regal Motel in the town of Las Vegas, New Mexico. The motel doors are unlocked with a key card – they no longer have physical keyholes which can be punched out by a pneumatic tank – nor are there any ventilation shafts for hiding cases of $2.4 million. However, the exterior white brickwork remains unchanged, and I couldn’t resist taking off my shoes like Anton Chigurh and posing in my (odd) socks.
16th July – Santa Fe, New Mexico
We drove on and reached Santa Fe, the capital city of New Mexico. McCarthy passed away here. The city became a large part of McCarthy’s later life. Since the 1990s, he’d had an office in the Santa Fe Institute, and enjoyed discussing subjects such as mathematics, physics, and engineering (anything but literature!) with colleagues and friends there. In 2017, he wrote his first academic article for the Institute, titled: ‘The Kekulé Problem’, a fascinating and very readable piece articulating his theories about the unconscious and how it communicates to the conscious mind via symbols.
I was really impressed by Santa Fe, particularly the lengths the city goes to to celebrate local art and artists, hosting free exhibitions inside the State Capitol building. I highly recommend Big Star Books and Music, a second-hand bookshop with a huge selection of books, including a fantastic McCarthy section. I’ve read six McCarthy novels so far. Although I’ve read All the Pretty Horses, I’m yet to finish The Border Trilogy. The Crossing (1994), part two of the trilogy, begins in New Mexico.
So, when I noticed a first edition of The Crossing on sale for a relatively affordable price, I couldn’t resist marking the end of my McCarthy road trip in New Mexico by purchasing a New Mexico-based novel, one I know will lead to more adventures ahead as a fan of the late, great giant of literature.
Prose
Encounters
