Renato Wakim

A non-fiction author and cultural researcher, I am guided by curiosity and a lifelong devotion to understanding the human landscape. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, I carry the pulse of that immense city within me, even as my path led me across continents starting in the early 1980s and eventually into the United States in the late 1990s, where new chapters of work and meaning began to unfold.

After years of travel and lived experience across cultures, I made my home in Burlington, Vermont, where New England’s seasons and quiet introspection shaped the next period of my life and work. Along the way, I cultivated a multifaceted career as a consultant across industries, moving fluidly between worlds while observing them with a writer’s eye.

Writing, however, entered my life in an unexpected way—later than most. In 2018, when my family home in Vermont burned down, I found myself in a hotel room, suspended between what had been lost and what had not yet begun. A few days after the fire, while sitting at the hotel patio in that temporary space, I tried to make sense of the experience. What emerged, almost in a single sitting, was the full outline of what would become my first book. Over the next twenty months, the act of writing proved more healing and transformative than I could have imagined — a way of turning devastation into inquiry, and inquiry into meaning. Why Not? A Memoir was born from that moment, from the instinct to shape rupture into something that could illuminate rather than consume. A few years later, Every Day (I Thank You) followed as a collection of stories of individuals—reflections on gratitude, resilience, and the quiet forces that shape a meaningful life—meditations on how a single piece of music can open a doorway into memory and honor to people and moments that carry us.

A wanderer above all, I am most alive in motion—in short or long walks, where movement becomes a form of intentional balance and rhythm; in departure lounges and lengthy highways; in unfamiliar streets and border crossings; and in the quiet revelation that comes from standing briefly inside another culture’s rhythm. And, just as importantly, in exploring the possibilities of sitting still, interspersed with movement, as Pico Iyer so beautifully explains in The Art of Stillness—Adventures in Going Nowhere: “Our creations come not when we’re out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we’re sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences.” He defines the writer’s role with clarity: “Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art.”

Travel, whichever way considered, is not escape but inquiry: a way of listening to the world. A music aficionado, I pay close attention to its meaning, find companionship in literature, and seek clarity in wild places. These sensibilities also shaped my last work, Sound Bridges, my exploration of how sound becomes a vessel for memory, resilience, and belonging across nine countries. The book traces the ways people use music to stay connected to who they are, especially in moments of displacement or change.

Recently, my wife and I relocated to Bellingham, Washington, drawn by family and by the Pacific Northwest’s cathedral of mist—its evergreen forests, rugged coastline, and silent, snow‑crowned peaks rising like ancient sentinels over the sea.