“Out there, the boys and I became outlaws on the run, staking out a spot to spend the night…We became the desert animals, the howling packs of coyotes and screeching herds of javelina. In the desert, you could be anything or anyone and that’s what I loved about where I grew up most of all.”
“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.”
Andalucia by Andrew and Suzanne Edwards (I.B. Taurus, $25) Reviewed by Nina Lewallen Hufford Now that we all travel with smartphones—with Google maps, Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Expedia at our fingertips—heavy, text-driven guidebooks...
“I love other places – Paris, Hawaii, Rome – but nothing lies deeper within me than the West.”
“…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…”
“Paris, for me, after having lived there so many years, gives a sense of permanence and rootedness to my work. It feels like home, as do Napoli and Charleston…”
Farsickness Journal features “Inscription,” a place poem by Kathy Fagan.
“I am from a West that has resonated with me: empty highways, scree slopes, prairie vistas, river bottoms, rainy seashores, Barry Lopez short stories, Elton Bennett prints…”
“I was an immigrant kid, first in Europe and then in the U.S., and this gave me a constant pervasive sense of there being an ‘elsewhere’…”
“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.
On Peter Gizzi’s “It Was Raining in Delft”: A poem featuring “the heightened, stripped-bare world of the sleep-deprived traveler.”
The flood of writing began almost immediately, and I don’t know if I’ll ever understand why. Was it the quality of the light that makes Oaxaca famous as the arts capital of Mexico, pulling artists from across the Americas to call it home?
June in the San Francisco Bay Area marks my family regularly heading West -- from our already very westerly home in quasi-urban Berkeley, over to the wildernesses of Marin County, where we hike and bike in the exquisite, dramatic protected spaces that constitute 80%...
I've never been a collector, but I have a small---call it "well-edited"---and much-loved collection of maps. One highlight is my 1972 NYC subway map by Massimo Vignelli. It came to me folded up, like the regular map it is. I bought it off of Ebay from a vendor...
Having wandered through my share of vast, eerily deserted archaeological sites, I was pulled in by the first line of Ernest Hilbert's poem, "Dusk in the Ruins": "I arrive, one more uninvited guest." With this unsentimental tone established, the speaker explores...
By Megan Harlan Few places can both cure and inspire farsickness like a library. Now, we all know—or have been firmly told—that print is officially dead and the Internet has killed the research desk. But what Google, e-books, and their ilk can't provide is the...
“The story is organically American, and like all great fairy tales pulls from deeper sources. The fact that it is framed as travel adventure—forced travel at that—tugs at deep cultural memories.”
I have always been fascinated by the way Emily Dickinson -- legendary for rarely traveling beyond her western Massachusetts backyard -- populates her poems with so many exotic locales. And she does so with such playful abandon, as if the place-names are her own vast...
This poem jumped out at me in a recent issue of the literary journal, Southwest Review, thanks to its unlikely subject-matter -- it's the first poem I've ever run across about a motorcycle rally. But I love the way the poem rushes headlong into the strange,...
I'm planning a trip to New York -- I almost wrote, "home" to New York, though I haven't lived there in years -- where my family and I will be staying way downtown, in the thick of Manhattan's original streets. It got me thinking about Columbus Park -- not far from...
