Wanaka author Nathan Weathington is back from a five-week tour of the United States to promote the release of his latest book, Invasion of the Bastard Cannibals.

The book, Nathan’s second, is a comic memoir following on from the equally-memorably named Where the Hell Were Your Parents?, which was released in 2014.

Where the Hell Were Your Parents? is a coming of age memoir about growing up "feral” in the rural South, while Invasion of the Bastard Cannibals was described by Nathan as about "the idea of taking someone like me from reserved rural south and moving to the hippie infested-coast of Canada”.

Originally from the small American town of Bremen, Georgia, Nathan lived for a time in British Columbia with his Canadian wife, Morgan. The book takes a humorous look at his experiences in western Canada, including the time he met a "retired stripper from a vegan strip club”. There are also anecdotes from his childhood in Georgia, such as about the time Nathan and his brother set up a "racoon removal scheme”.

Nathan said one highlight of the tour was launching the book on September 16 at ‘The Shoe Burnin’ Show’ as part of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance’s Discovery Show in New Orleans. Nathan appeared alongside writers like Harrison Scott Key, author of The World’s Largest Man and winner of the 2016 Thurber Prize in American Humor, and New York Times bestselling author Karen White. He said he took the stage after a serious moment in the evening and was told by one of the organisers his job was to make everyone in the room laugh. He did.

"To see 300 people laughing at some joke I wrote is better than anything,” Nathan said.

The tour lasted for nearly six weeks and involved at least one event per day, as well as sometimes a second lasting well into the night. ("My publisher said if I had a speciality in the industry, it is selling books to drunk people,” Nathan laughed).

Nathan said touring as a writer is sometimes a surreal experience, as it was not a career he expected to fall into. He has a bachelor of Civil Engineering from Auburn University and an MBA from the University of Victoria, and has worked as everything from a bartender to a maths teacher to, latterly, a media executive putting in 70 to 80 hours a week, something he said he does not miss. He moved to New Zealand five years ago with Morgan and their two children, now aged seven and nine. 

The books had their genesis in a moment onstage in a Korean karaoke bar where Nathan, who is not much of singer, elected to tell jokes and funny stories instead. "I had all these skits and stories in my head, but had never written them down or performed them. I basically delivered a five-minute comedy set.” He said there was a brief millisecond of silence, then the whole audience started laughing. "That’s when I was hooked,” he said.

He explained that, while he loves writing and poetry, he still doesn’t put himself in the same category as many writers. "As my publisher said, we’re not selling prose, we’re selling laughs,” he said.

As for the best feedback he has received on his writing, Nathan said it has to be this response from a reader called Michelle Goodwine: "My husband just read this book for the third time. I’ve never actually seen him read a book. I honestly thought he couldn’t read."  

You can buy Invasion of the Bastard Cannibals now from Amazon. See More below. 

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