My Way to Canossa | A Novel Told in Episodes

Welcome to My Way to Canossa, a novel that can be experienced in various ways. The episodes unfold as audio, electronic text, or on the printed page. If you'd like to start at the beginning, scroll down for various options.

Thoroughly absurd and yet all-too-real, My Way to Canossa re-imagines the Middle Ages amid the political and technological changes of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

It isn't an historical novel. It's an investigation of how the present uses the past.

In the midst of a worldwide financial crisis, an American history buff flies to Germany, rents a minivan, and picks up some passengers in the town of Speyer. Then he sets off to drive across the Alps, retracing the medieval Walk to Canossa with the original participants riding along.

The year is 2009, but in the minivan, it's 1077.

My Way to Canossa also explores:

a Canadian self-help book for men, with roots in the anti-Semitic movement of 19th century Germany,
an ultra-Catholic biography of a warrior princess, marketed to teenage girls,
and pop-feminist telenovelas full of wish-fulfillment fantasies...

...all interwoven with the history buff's blog.

🎧 Start from Episode 1

Apple Podcasts Spotify RSS Feed

📚 Read or Listen to the Book

Print book (Lulu) Designed by Manofalsa Editores, Peru Kindle eBook Audible

📜 A Brief History of the Project

My Way to Canossa began in 2009 as an internet-based project, appearing initially as a "false travel blog." It soon began to include investigations into imaginary—but all too plausible—examples of "bad history." Portions of the project appeared in various forms on blogging platforms including Blogger, WordPress, Joomla, and Medium between 2009 and 2017. For many years, the author resisted the idea that he was "writing a novel"—preferring concepts like "web-based hypertext art" and "historical research as dark comedy."

Eventually he realized that he was creating a book-length piece of imaginative writing with a preferred reading order, which is basically the same as a novel. A print book and e-book were published in 2018, with similar content but a very different structure.

The author recorded the entire text in 2023 and 2024, a process in which his voice—what it would and would not say out loud—became the authoritative text editor. A podcast and serial version was released via Substack in 2024.

In 2025, Manofalsa Editores of Lima, Peru released a special limited edition of My Way to Canossa, the visual design of which is the basis of current versions.

✍️ About the Author

David Brendan O'Meara is a writer, actor and translator from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In addition to My Way to Canossa, which began as a false blog in 2009, Dave is the author of the three verse monologues (Parsimony, Group Theory, and Teratology) collected in book form as Three Plays for One Actor. Dave has translated the poetry and prose of such Latin American writers as Sergio Fong, Andrés Cisnegro, Rubén Medina, Julio Grotten and Juan Esteban Harrington, and toured Peru and Mexico with Teratología, his own translation of Teratology, published by Manofalsa Editores.