on writing and travel: particularities of place and imprints of inspiration
an essay
Hello friends. Summer is quietly coming to an end and it feels like a while since I’ve posted on Substack. Life has been busy and has pulled me away from writing as much as I’d like to. Life stuff is a never-ending genre of things that demand attention and time, nudging up against the edges of the time and energy I have to write. It’s bound to happen, and it’s okay. All that matters is that we eventually return to creating our art — pen to page, fingers to keyboard.
A few days ago, I returned from a trip to Quebec and Montreal with my husband. The trip was to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, and it was our last “big trip” of the year. In the weeks before our vacation, I’d allowed myself to get a little bit too stressed out with various things, so our getaway came at an especially good time to clear my head, get some perspective, and relax as a couple.
I always feel inspired and energized coming back from vacations like this. International trips especially, because they force me to get out of my own head and see the world from a different viewpoint. Even domestic trips can have this effect when you make an effort to explore and get acquainted with the local culture. I want to share a little more about why this is for me.
I’m going to tell you a story about where my zest for travel and love for writing comes from. To do that, I need to go back to about ten years ago when I was getting ready to graduate college. Many of my close friends already know this story, but for those of you who don’t, I hope you enjoy.
In my final semester of college, I applied on a whim to the Teaching Assistantship Program in France (TAPIF), a teach-abroad program that a French professor had once mentioned. Without a clear idea of what career to pursue or what to do with the rest of my life, the prospect of living in France for a year was awe-inspiring and sounded like just the free-wheeling adventure I needed. It wasn’t a permanent job, as each TAPIF term runs only for one academic year, but it was something. It was the key to my “next chapter,” the phrase everyone kept referencing in graduation cards.
In the small French town where I was assigned, Montargis, I quickly discovered I was the only American there and one of the only few English speakers. Though situated in the Loire Valley, which draws millions of tourists annually to its stunning landscapes, mesmerizing chateaus, and renowned wines, Montargis was a locals’ town.
I dove into the French culture as best I could and committed myself to my new role as a teaching assistant. I created lesson plans for the students, assisted with small group exercises for the full-time teachers, and ran after-school conversation groups for students who were especially eager to practice English. During the abundant vacances provided by the French public school system, I traveled throughout France with discounted train tickets through my carte jeune pass. I had a few friends in Europe who were studying abroad, and I met other language assistants at our orientation in the nearby city of Orléans. Taking advantage of every connection I had, and often traveling solo, I set out to see as much of France and Europe as I could during my year there.
On my weeknights and occasional weekends in Montargis, I was also very lonely. Decidedly rural and secluded and with just over fourteen thousand inhabitants, Montargis was not a place with much of a social scene for young adults. The school where I taught, Lycée en Forêt — the literal translation of High School in the Forest —was fittingly surrounded by woods and stood an almost two-mile walk from the town’s modest centre-ville. When trying to order a pizza delivery on my first weekend in Montargis, the takeout pizza restaurant told me on the phone that they “don’t deliver to the forest.”
I began writing essays on my afternoons off and weekends in town. My new environment was so different from my life on campus at Penn State and my suburban Maryland hometown and I needed to express that to myself. I had all the essentials in Montargis and it was, by all accounts, still a privileged existence, but the remoteness of the place, the insistently slow pace of life, felt worlds away from what my friends in the U.S. knew. I wanted to share this new place with them, draw them into this foreign town that felt strange and beautiful and particular.
My first blog post was an introduction to Montargis, an essay I titled “The Real France.” Writing about my students – essential characters in the story of my year teaching aboard – always added a dash of humor to the posts. During my first week of classes, my French students had an endless stream of questions about being an American. They wanted to know what my favorite American TV shows were; if I knew anyone who owned a gun and how I felt about the NRA; what the American Superbowl was like; if the suburbs in the U.S. really looked the way they were shown on Desperate Housewives and Pretty Little Liars. I set up a basic blog on WordPress and shared this introductory post on my Facebook page. I was buoyed by the likes and comments from my friends and acquaintances. So, I kept going.
Not only did I document my adventures in small-town France and the classroom, but I wrote about my travels throughout Europe. I stayed in hostels in Paris, Budapest, Brussels, and Amsterdam, where I met other teaching assistants and young people on various types of gap years. I attended free city walking tours where I met fellow expats on a budget and joined a French Meet Up-type site called On Va Sortir, where I joined excursions with other young travelers. These experiences exposed me to people from all over, backpackers and travelers from Australia, Germany, Britain, Sweden, and other Americans. I was enthralled by all of their stories.
Like me, my hostel peers were mostly in their twenties and on the cusp of a more rooted, adult existence. My fellow travelers were also trying to figure out their direction and purpose in life. Many of them were taking a break from education or careers or whatever trajectory they were on that had started to feel stale. Through casual interactions with them, I came to understand that I wasn’t the only one looking for perspective and meaning. They were also seeking inspiration for a life well-lived. I loved that traveling and the communal culture of the hostels gave this to people – a sense of expansiveness. The space to see that we can choose our own adventures. Travel was a way to diverge from a path that seemed too well worn, too predictably trodden.
I was young and impressionable and awestruck by the myriad cultures and cities I was walking into, and every new experience felt singularly precious, like something that needed to be captured and wrapped up perfectly. There was the French literature teacher at Lycée en Forêt who invited me to dinners at his apartment, where he would cook beautiful meals, tell me about his travels, and let me practice French with him. The Chinese teacher who gave me and another language assistant a master class in dumpling making at her house one weekend. The students, hardworking and earnest, who were so hungry for anything I could tell them about American culture. I wanted to write it all down in my blog where it would live on forever. I wanted my friends and family and Facebook followers to explore small-town France and the expat hostel culture alongside me
In retrospect, this was an essential exercise for me as a writer. I wasn’t seeking out any critique from others, or second guessing myself (at least not much), or wondering if what I was sharing was interesting enough or good enough or if the prose was writerly enough. I was just dashing off pages on my blog, getting down the stories that felt important and sacred to me. I wanted to transcribe something that was unique to my experiences, but contained emotions that others could relate to, though I’m not sure I would have been able to articulate that at the time.
Everything felt so worthy of becoming a story. As stunning as were many of the places I traveled – the scrolling gothic architecture and storied wineries of Bordeaux, the sun-kissed pastel houses of Vieux Nice, and the granite-ensconced, seaside city of Saint-Malo – the things I turned into auto-fiction blog posts were just as often mundane. Buying a necklace in the medieval city of Èze on the French Riviera only to discover later that it had been stolen. Helping my students practice for their oral English exams; the answers they came up with for prompts about “their heroes” or “technology and progress.” Having a late-night dinner of croque-monsieurs with a group of ex-pats I met in a Paris hostel.
When I returned from France, the hard reality of finding my first job set in. As I sent out dozens of applications to internships and entry-level positions, I came to understand that I was now part of the real world. The real world could be unyielding, and it was certainly filled with rejection, something I was being served in high volume on my job applications. The hostel-hopping European dreamscape I had inhabited for the past eight months had been just that, some sort of alternate reality.
I had been correct to write it all down in my attempt to remember every mood, detail, and feeling. All that remained were my memories, a box full of handmade cards from my French students, and of course, the blog.
I added the blog to a line on my resume. At first, I wasn’t sure if it belonged there. The essays and short stories themselves weren’t exactly professional experience, but when my career mentor saw my long list of posts from the past eight months – my artistic portfolio – she encouraged me to keep it there. As I began interviewing for jobs, I learned that prospective employers were reading it, and even enjoying the blog posts.
Sitting in an interview at the company where I still work, the organization’s communications director asked me about the lost necklace story. The story was about a larimar necklace I had purchased at a quaint jewelry shop in the hilltop city of Èze that had later been lost or stolen. Apparently, she had read the piece. What inspired the story? She asked. Was there a message? Why had I written it?
“I guess the necklace wasn’t the point,” I said. “It’s a metaphor. For the experience on the French Riviera and wanting to hold onto it.”
I did hold onto it. I’m not sure if I would have found this specific creative path without my year in Montargis or the blog. I like to think that I would have, that my instinct for wanting to capture each exquisite detail of my experiences — or some emotional truth beneath them — would have shown up in my life in one way or another. Maybe through another creative medium, if not writing.
My time in France helped me cultivate the ability to see the magic and mysticism in the smallest of moments. It instilled in me the practice of remaining curious and keeping my eyes peeled for beauty. One connection I continue to draw between writing and travel is their ways of being both specific and general. The particularity of a certain time and place in the world – and the richness of characters, tensions and backstories that lay beneath the surface – that is so distinctive yet relatable to others. Maybe we travel to reach outside of ourselves – and in the process to understand ourselves and the world a bit better. Perhaps, we write for the same reasons.
Beautiful! I am trying to get back into a writing practice myself, and this definitely helped!