“I saw sea stars clinging on sea stacks and tufted puffins walking like older men. It always comes back to water and animals and seeing animals in their habitats unbothered by humans.”
“I saw sea stars clinging on sea stacks and tufted puffins walking like older men. It always comes back to water and animals and seeing animals in their habitats unbothered by humans.”
“Although my travel throughout Europe had been extensive, I was over 50 when I visited Borobudur on Java. On the plane coming home, words starting coming in a rush, so fast I was hardly able to keep up.”
“…the most extensive writing project I did based on place was a series of ten poems about a trip to Tanzania to climb Kilimanjaro and to safari in Ngororgoro crater…”
“I boarded the tall ship Antigua and sailed for two weeks up the west coast of Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago…”
“The open spaces of Montana and Wyoming infused me with the desire to write a third novel…”
“I was a Fulbright professor in Oldenburg, staying for a year, and the room I rented was in the town’s very tiny red light district, arranged by my boss as, I think, a kind of joke.”
“The commune smelled of cow manure, unwashed hair. We held pig roasts, ran through the woods in fifty person games—it was wonderful and chaotic.”
“Even now, whenever I am at an airport, I still experience a mixture of longing and excitement, the feeling that I am on the cusp of something extraordinary.”
“I have to say that my time spent in Japan has been my core inspiration. Having had a mother who was born and raised there, the place and the culture are part of me…”
“Some people travel to see new places and get focused on the next place, and the next, but I love revisiting places that hold memories.”
“As a child, I suffered from ‘anywhere but here’ syndrome, even though I was raised among people who thought a crosstown bus could take you too far away from home.”
Four Questions on Farsickness is an interview series with creative writers for whom place is essential to their work.