Four Questions on Farsickness: Anne Goldman

1. Share a little about where you’re from. When you were growing up, what place—real or imagined—most fascinated you, and why?

When I was young, Egypt fascinated me more than any other place. This intrigue grew out of the country’s extraordinary architecture in antiquity, but also my dim understanding of the sweep of the Nile and the grandeur of the country’s long-ago history, which seemed at once one to which I had no access and simultaneously one that I could understand or at least approach thanks to mummies I had seen in museums and the vibrant pictorials of hieroglyphics. As a child, death seemed as strange to me as did other species. But like many other children, the brilliant coffins pulled me to wonder about mortality. The beauty of Egypt’s afterlife was astonishing. Of course back then I did not consider that it was only the people at the very pinnacle of the society that had the means to memorialize themselves in this way. Egypt fascinated me for its heat and vastness of sky as well. I spent my school years outside the city of Boston where the trees are lush-leafed and water is everywhere. Now that I’ve lived in California for so many decades (an arid state that is increasingly threatened with drought), it strikes me that it is partly a distinctly different climate that called me. When I was eighteen, I ended up falling in love with New Mexico–another desert place. The first time I saw it, while riding a Greyhound bus in the middle of the night, I knew that it was a place I wanted to be. Those rock formations, stark under the moonlight. I’ve never owned a house, but for about fifteen years, I’ve owned two acres of land between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

New Mexico (Credit: Anne Goldman)

2. What travel has been a particular inspiration to your work?

My father was a scientist, and like many scientists, he collaborated extensively with people elsewhere. In 1973-74 we lived in England while he was on sabbatical at the Hammersmith Hospital. The year I spent living in London has formed who I am to a very great extent. It did not create curiosity for me, but gave this faculty a lot of fuel and rewarded my questions and wonderings by supplying me with a rich and sometimes conflicted but vibrant series of images. At thirteen, I was transported from a very small town where I was not yet driving and where the circle of places I knew was small—Friendly ice cream parlor, the Wayland Public Library where I worked as a page through high school shelving books, and the marshes where cattails grew by the side of the Old Sudbury Road where I liked to jog—to a metropolis that I could navigate. And did navigate, actually, on my own, thanks to the Underground and the busses. I will never forget the sense of intoxication I felt each time I chose a new Underground station at which to surface from the darkness of the tunnels and found myself in the often cloudy light at some storied monument or iconic lane or mews or crescent or street. It was the same kind of transport I experienced through reading. Eventually I ended up writing about these twin conveyances of travel very explicitly in a 2014 essay, “Travels with Jane Eyre.”

Balliol College, Oxford (Credit: Anne Goldman)

3. Where do you “escape to” to recharge creativity?

I escape outside. Just to hear the wind in the trees, whether in a moment of silence in a city when the traffic has ceased; or, as now, in Sebastopol, which is quiet enough that in warm weather I can simply open my window and hear the talk of the trees. I really just need to get outside to begin prompting myself to think of new sentences and sounds.

4. Where would you most like to travel to next?

I’ve been lucky enough to live both in the Middle East and in Europe. Probably because it’s a way of traveling in time as well as in space, I most yearn, right now, to revisit England. That year, despite the fact that it was my awkward age, was enchanted. It offered me possibility and the sense of outlooks unlike my own. And in offering material confirmation of the places I had read about in novels like Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice, it confirmed the imagination as a kind of secret garden–a good place to be. It was a romantic year, and I was just old enough to understand this and to know that not very year would be equal to it.

Bath, England (Credit: Anne Goldman)

Anne Goldman‘s most recent book is Stargazing in the Atomic Age. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Tin House, the Guardian, the Georgia Review, the Gettsyburg Review, and the Southwest Review. Her essays have been named as notable in Best American Essays, Best American Science and Nature Writing, and the Best American Travel Writing. Nominated for a National Magazine Award, she is the recipient of fellowships from the Ahmanson/Getty Foundation and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is a professor of English at Sonoma State University. Find her online at www.annegoldmanwriter.com.