About Farsickness
FARSICKNESS is a rough translation of the German word, fernweh. It means the opposite of homesickness (heimweh)—a yearning for distant places.
Farsickness is a sensation that so often inspires writing, reading, and travel—and often as they wind together. It is the thread that connects the writing here.
About Farsickness Journal
FARSICKNESS JOURNAL explores place through creative writing, with pieces on the following subjects:
- Farsickness Essay: Creative nonfiction on the transformative nature of place.
- Placemakers: Brief narratives on distinctive places, including the people who make them.
Four Questions on Farsickness is an interview series with creative writers for whom place is essential to their work.
- Place Poems: Excerpts from, thoughts on, and links to extraordinary poems about place.
- Place in Story: Fiction and creative nonfiction books that are centered on setting.
- Book Reviews: Reviews of books in which place plays a central role.
Farsickness Journal has been featured in the Memoir Monday newsletter, Berkeleyside, and Among Worlds Magazine.
About the Editor
Megan Harlan is an award-winning essayist and poet who grew up in seventeen homes across four continents. She’s the author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays, winner of the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction (University of Georgia Press, 2020) and critically acclaimed in The New York Times Book Review, Kirkus, Booklist, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection, Mapmaking (BkMk Press/New Letters), was awarded the John Ciardi Prize and called “a miracle of invention” by Alice Fulton. Her writing has been cited as distinguished in Best American Essays 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2023, and published in AGNI, The New York Times, Hotel Amerika, Arts & Letters, Poetry Daily, Crazyhorse, American Poetry Review and TriQuarterly. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and Brittany, France, and writes a newsletter, The France House, on making a second home and a (more) creative life. For more, please visit her website, meganharlan.com.
(“Farsickness” is a word with which Megan has a long history: It inspired a poem by that name, reprinted on Verse Daily, which appeared in her 2010 book, Mapmaking. She first ran across fernweh on a travel writing assignment to the Sahara Desert, where she was told there is an Arabic word used by desert nomads for the exact experience of farsickness. After much searching, she could find no such word in Arabic, but did discover that — naturally — German has a word for it.)
Megan visiting megaliths in Brittany (Lampouy, France).
