Patagonian Road: In Print!

It's official, dear readers!

PATAGONIAN ROAD is due to hit presses in the spring of 2017, with a soft release in February and an official, real-deal, bigtime release in April! Thanks to Andrew Gifford at the Santa Fe Writers Project for believing in this project.

While you await my pages, do feast your eyes upon the preliminary cover, as well as the tantalizing copy that we hope will lure in readers near and far.

Thanks for the years of support, dear readers. It's finally happening!

Spanning four seasons, ten countries, three teaching jobs, and countless buses, Patagonian Road: A Year Alone Through Latin America chronicles Kate McCahill’s solo journey from Guatemala to Argentina. In her struggles with language, romance, culture, service, and homesickness, she personifies a growing culture of women for whom travel is not a path to love but a route to meaningful work, rare inspiration, and profound self-discovery.

Following the route Paul Theroux outlined in his 1979 travelogue, The Old Patagonian Express, McCahill transports the reader from a classroom in a rugged Quito barrio to a dingy rented room in an El Salvadorian brothel, and from the storied neighborhoods of Buenos Aires to the heights the Peruvian Andes.

A testament to courage, solitude, and the rewards of taking risks, Patagonian Road proves that discovery, clarity, and simplicity remain possible in the 21st century, and that travel holds an enduring capacity to transform.

“McCahill is a blues traveler, singing for citizens of the world who have no public voice. She depicts beauty within despair, allowing us to hear a comforting melody in an unsettling breeze and see the gorgeous colors within a bruise. If a feeling of loneliness pervades her essays, so do feelings of wonder and pleasure. It’s simply impossible not to share her joyful and frequently bewildering sensations of travel.”
— Sascha Feinstein, author of Black Pearls

Irish Eyes

In Ireland, people ask us where we’re going if they see us looking at a map. Sometimes, they tell us to put the map away, and then they just walk us to where we want to go. Community meetings happen in the schools or in the pubs, and everyone we walk past smiles. Lovely day, they say, even on the shittiest days. All the drivers wave when they pass by.

At the bar the other night, I sat and read the news: fifty dead and fifty more hurt, a massacre of unutterable horror. One man hid in a bathroom stall while, in the next one, everyone inside was gunned down. One woman remembers the last drink she ordered before she made it out the exit, just in time. Cell phone videos play a pumping beat, a shrieking crowd – drunk, euphoric – and the guns sound like part of the song. I sat at the Irish bar and felt sick, and the bartender, his eyes so kind, asked what was making me sad. I told him, and he didn't say he was sorry, or how terrible, or how sick. He looked down at his hands – big workman’s hands – because somehow the Irish know when words just won't work.

In Ireland, no one mentions Donald Trump unless we bring him up first. Many Irish have relatives in America now. People ask me when my wedding is, ask about my dress – even the men ask about my dress. Every morning when we leave for the next town, they wish me a lucky marriage. They make little jokes about grandkids, and they wave as we walk away.

It’s a kind place, Ireland, a gentle and beautiful place. At least, that is what we see: rolling hills, sweeping views, crashing coasts buffered by munching sheep. We see sweet, smiling faces and polite, well-behaved children. We see friendly cows, friendly dogs, shy but friendly cats. People offer us rides and seem embarrassed when we push money into their hands. They push it back towards us, shaking their heads.

Every night as I wait for sleep to come, I marvel at this beauty: unsullied and raw and real. Still, every place knows death, knows blood, and these shattering coasts are no exception. Everywhere there’s ugliness; every day you can find it, if you look. I think back to a dark-eyed, brooding student who, in the middle of class, said something to the woman next to him that made her scream and leave the room. Neither of them ever came back. There’s the woman I met in Santa Fe who walked there from Guatemala, and on the way, her baby died. She had to leave him behind. Him, she said, a fist against her mouth. There’s the boy I knew my whole life who, when I brought my college friends to my hometown, raped one of them beneath the toboggan chute before it was even dark out. All tragedies, all small compared to fifty people dead. The horror of that guy in the bathroom stall still pervades my dreams, and I think that life is too fucked up to fathom.

Who have you lost? a friend recently asked, and I thought of a life cut short beneath thin ice, another halved by pills and booze, a third crushed beneath the weight of sorrow, small at first but enormous by the time a decade passed. I thought of my father’s face in his hands the day his mother died. Without death, I know, we couldn’t live. Without blood, there would never be beauty.

Still, to make sense is impossible.

So the best we can do is to mourn and then learn. We must grieve, weep, and remember. We must rally, lobby, speak out, and educate. We must change our laws. We must change our minds, and once that's done, we must be brave and fight to change other minds, too.

Meanwhile, may we the living seek out beauty today, and say a prayer: For the stranger who shows you the way. For the lover who teaches you trust. For the wedding that’s just around the bend, and for all the years that stretch beyond it  – happy years, you hope, but of course you never know. For the child who runs into the rain just as it’s starting to fall: she’s dancing now, and her grandfather runs out to join her. For the bird that smacked the window and fell, and for my partner, who went out and stroked it and stroked it until finally it beat its wings and flew away. For all the little gifts that make up a day, and for the lessons we might take from the horror. For the laws that might change when we finally decide that we won't lose our freedom if we put down our guns.

To all those beautiful lives lost on a terrible Florida Sunday: May your deaths not be a waste. May we learn from this terrible loss. May beauty grow up from your ashes.

Vida

The Diver’s Clothes Lying Empty

You are sitting here with us,  

but you are also out walking in a field at dawn.

You are yourself the animal we hunt  

when you come with us on the hunt.

You are in your body  

like a plant is solid in the ground,  

yet you are wind.

You are the diver’s clothes  

lying empty on the beach.  

You are the fish.

Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

**************************************************************************************

Give me something easy, I say to Peg, the head librarian. She juts her chin towards the farthest rack from the reference desk. Vida, she says. At this point in the semester, everyone's gruff, but Peg is always like that - at least at first, when you don't yet know that she's just got a really acute bullshit meter, and - in the beginning - you've got to prove yourself to her.

Anyway, I trust Peg. She thinks I am a good customer of the library, and she gives good advice. Sometimes, head librarians are the only ones you can trust. When all I needed was something lusty and artsy and crimson, Peg gave me Paris Red by Maureen Gibbon. When I looked like I could use a very tall glass of wine and a very easy read, she gave me Misty Copeland's Life in Motion. Once, Peg and I discussed Lily King's Euphoria for half an hour, gushing and gushing and, in the end, laughing snidely. I don't remember why. I think Peg reads at least one book a day.

And so when she says, Vida, I go and figure out what she's talking about. I scan the covers until I see the author's name: Vendela Vida. I haven't heard of her, and I'm sometimes intimidated by writers with exotic names. But it's a smallish book, and the cover pictures a woman walking beneath a Middle-Eastern looking arch. Vendela Vida: The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty. I check it out.

As often happens, Vida languishes on the kitchen table until it's due back at the library. Laura from reference calls, as she does once a month or so, to remind me my book is late. I bring it back to Peg, and she checks it out again, and I take it home again and this time I read the jacket, the back cover, and then I turn to the back jacket and look at Vida: pretty, fortyish, vaguely sexy, vaguely foreign. I begin to read.

After about two pages, I close the book. No. Once, an agent told me that no one will ever represent your manuscript if it's in the second person. You, you, you, you, you, Vida's book goes, and I don't read any farther because no, no, it isn't me, it's you, Vida, it's you. I go upstairs and look up Vida's review on the New York Times. Parul Sehgal writes:

Ms. Vida has opted for the second person, hoping, it seems, that its intimacy might invite the reader to plunge more deeply into the story...There’s a temptation to set the book aside immediately, preferably with tongs. Resist the urge.

OK, fine. So she gets to break the rules. She has like three books already, after all.

I go back downstairs; I pick up Vida; I read on.

In the end, there's intrigue and mystery and little echoes of Beautiful Ruins, that fantastical (and fantastically popular, though I couldn't ever quite get into it) book by Jess Walter. There are relationships with "famous American actresses" who look radiant, radiant, but in real-life are predictably bitchy. There are predictable American tourists, and even a storyline I could predict: a baby, a sister, an escape.

Still, I read Vida's book word for word, page by page. Lush, rich detail, as one reviewer praised? I don't know about that - I'm not sure I ever quite saw Casablanca, where the story was set. And Lena Dunham, one of the more prestigious reviewers, claims there's great humor there, but I never laughed aloud. And I mean, the most beautiful part of the whole book is the Rumi quote from which the title - the diver's clothes - is drawn.

Yet there is something about Vida's book that snagged me and held on. I devoured it in basically one sitting (I did get up to pee and feed the cat and cook dinner and sleep and wake up). Still, in the morning I sat down with Vida before I even started the coffee, and by the time I read the final page, I was late for class. My heart was beating hard.

I love a book like that.

Thanks, Peg.

Tango Slide

Check it out, everyone!

My travel essay, "Street Tango in Buenos Aires," at Your Life is a Trip, Judith Fein's chic, place-based site for stories from around the globe.

Thank you, Judith, for your editorial prowess, and thanks also to Ellen, for making my words look so lovely.

Enjoy this sunlit eve, dear readers. Summer on!

Euphoria

I had just finished Wild by Cheryl Strayed—a book that made me laugh, weep, and write earnestly into the night. Next I mused over In Some Other World, Maybe, a smart, very trendy, and ultimately memorable novel by Shari Goldhagen. I was having a blast. These women writers were feeding my summertime soul, and I wanted more. I wanted something fresh, something that would make me think, but not too hard. It is summer, after all.

Euphoria, Lily King's newest, had been sitting on the kitchen table for about two months. Before Wild and In Some Other World, I'd gone through a reading drought, so to speak. Do you ever have those? All through a hectic semester and a month-long road trip across the country, library books languished on my kitchen table. I unwound with LL Bean catalogs, Every Day with Rachael Ray Magazine, and The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks. Some choices we just can't explain.

In any case, finally. The moonsoons had arrived, bringing to a blessed close my reading drought. I poured a glass of wine and took Euphoria outside. For a moment, I watched the setting sun and inhaled hot pinion.

Then I opened the book, and almost immediately my world fell away, replaced swiftly and fully with King's. Euphoria was a different animal than anything I'd recently read, and I understood immediately that King writes at a whole other level than most. Above being a storyteller, she is a sort of research-artist, a painter whose pigments include facts, dates, and theories. She is a setter of well-researched scenes and well-considered characters. She is a master of point of view, structure, and restraint. An hour and a half later, my full glass of wine had some flies in it. The sun had set, and I realized I was cold.

I warn you, fellow writers: in King's presence you'll be humbled, whoever you are.

Of King's fourth novel, Emily Eakin of the NYTimes writes, "[Euphoria] is rife with such visceral imagery and pungent with the stink of disease, foul breath and unwashed bodies." Eakin adds that "The threat of violence and death looms from Page 1." The review closes with this: "In King’s exquisite book, desire — for knowledge, fame, another person — is only fleetingly rewarded, and gratification is inseparable from self-­deceit."

Ms. Eakin, I must politely disagree with it all. Well, all except the exquisite. Euphoria is certainly filled with visceral stink and foul breath and the threat of violence, but this after all is a book about white anthropologists traveling the Sepik River in New Guinea in 1933. What did Ms. Eakin expect? In her vaguely coy (but ever stylish) review, she overlooks what really roots the reader to Euphoria: the book's humanity. A sustained, dynamic current of sensuality and desire runs beneath the whole story, connecting each character and scene. This is the Copula Spider Doug Glover was talking about: bodies, sweat, pain, want, over and over again. Desire may be fleetingly rewarded for the characters, as Eakin claims, but for the reader the effects endure.

Speaking of want, it's immediately clear in Euphoria what every character wants. I've heard this is something you're supposed to do in fiction: understand what your protagonist wants most in the world, and tell your reader. In Euphoria, one character wants more than anything to learn. Another wants a place to call his own, and a woman to join him there. A third wants—well, I guess there is one character whose desires are less clear. Maybe he wants to forget. Maybe he wants never to leave the Sepik River.

It's all in the book, my lovelies, it's all in the book, so best not miss out on this lush work of art. King will take you to a place you've never been, a muggy, buggy place you won't want to leave. Weird, I know, but just trust me on this one. Euphoria looks short, like maybe you'll finish it in one night, but I assure you, dear reader, you will not.

You'll Never Walk Alone

Read my writing at The Millions!

Thanks to Philip Graham for the nudge, and to C. Max Magee, for making my essay look gorgeous.

And, thanks to Katie Thebeau for her images.

Onward and upward!

Ken Budd on Agents, Publicity, and Writing About Those You Love

Meet Ken Budd, everyone! He's the author of The Voluntourist: A Six-Country Tale of Love, Loss, Fatherhood, Fate, and Singing Bon Jovi in Bethlehem. The memoir chronicles travel, volunteering, and the death of Budd's father.

Over the past few days, I've had the chance to chat with Budd - we covered agents, publicists, publishers, and the question every creative non-fiction writer wants to ask: To what extent can we write about the people we love?

In a New York Times opinion piece published in 2013, Budd writes:

"I wrote a memoir in the aftermath of my father’s death, and while the book was many things — a search for meaning, a travelogue, the story of my adventures as a global volunteer — it was largely a book about Dad. I was measuring my life against his, telling his stories, making him the ghostly muse in my midlife crisis, and I wondered if I, too, was doing some kind of wrong."

He adds, "My father never asked to be on display. And what we as memoirists choose to display — what we insist is essential to display — is an easy source of conflict. Dad grew up poor, never went to college, yet reached upper management with high-tech firms on both coasts. I wrote about this. It defined him. It fueled his drive and ambition. It defined me. I always felt like the lite beer to his stout ale."

It was a privelege to get to know Budd, whose answers to my questions were honest and useful. He agreed to let me share some of his insights with you, my dear readers. May Budd's words bring hope and inspiration to writers everywhere!

How did you get the idea for the book? I was about a third of the way through my journey when I thought… this might be a book. I had volunteered in New Orleans and then Costa Rica. At the time I was working at AARP The Magazine. The then-travel editor had assigned a story on volunteer travel that wasn’t working out and I said, “Tell you what: I’ll write about my experiences in Costa Rica. If you want to run it, fine. If not, no big deal.” The ensuing article got a nice response and after that I wrote a book proposal. I sought an agent and got turned down four or five times before finding the right person.

Wasn't it hard to get an agent? First I mailed my proposal to an agent here in DC. I had a slight connection: a colleague of mine had assigned an article to one of this agent's clients. I mailed the proposal and got no response - not even a form rejection letter. After that, I decided I needed connections. A travel writer I know was nice enough to introduce me to his agent. She passed, but recommended to me three agents she knew. They all passed as well. I think they saw potential in what I was pitching, but they were all older, established agents who weren't willing to invest themselves in my idea. They did, however, provide feedback on the proposal when I asked them, which helped me to strengthen the pitch. I'd reached a dead end when an agent pitched me a story at AARP. I said, "Hey, would you be interested in looking at this?" She did, and she was the right person. She was younger than the other agents I'd spoken with and she invested herself in the project. So if you want an agent, I'd suggest making connnections with other writers and asking if they'll make introductions.

How did the shape of the book change after you got an agent? I had originally proposed the book as more of a travel memoir. My agent convinced me that the real story was the fatherhood issues: the sudden death of my father and my struggle to accept that I would never be a father myself. She was right, so I revised the proposal and wrote a sample chapter. We got offers from [two large publishing houses]. After that, I volunteered in four more countries. So my editor made a leap of faith. She bought the book based in part on the sample chapter, but there was no guarantee that the rest of my travels would be memorable.

What did you do to promote the book? Everyone I knew who'd written a book said I would need to hire a publicist, and that's what I did. I got some publicity help from [my publisher] for the first month when the book came out, but publishers today just don't have the money for much beyond that. The publicity firm got me on 50+ radio shows along with some print and online interviews, and I wrote some byline pieces. If I had it to do over again, I'd hire a publicist long before the book came out, rather than after.

How was the book received with your family and friends? Was anyone hurt or put out? [A friend of mine] said, "I have a friend who wrote a memoir. It was a really beautiful book. None of his family will talk to him anymore, but the book was terrific." So that worried me. When you're writing, it's such as isolated process that you're not really thinking about the work being published and someone actually reading it. When my editor read the first draft, she said, "It's good - it's so honest." And I thought... Honest!? Oh shit! Honest isn't good!

What are you working on now? Most of my writing is still tied to the book, even though it came out three years ago. Most recently I wrote an online piece for National Geographic about criticism of volutourism. My primary focus, however, has been on developing a digital TV project tied loosely to the book. I did a fair amount of TV when I was at AARP, and the publicist I hired suggested that TV should be the next step. So I developed a TV proposal, and six months ago I signed a co-production agreement with a producer I'd met. The show would be a 12-episode series; each episode would focus on a different location and a particular quirky, giving-back project. We shot a three-minute trailer and developed an outline of episodes. After talking with some agents, we've decided to pursue it as a web-based series. We can maintain more control and build an audience, which could possibly lead to a network deal down the road. By this fall we'll be working with a company that will try to sell sponsorships.

 *

In his NYTimes piece, Budd writes:

"If you’re gonna do something, do it right. That’s the approach I took in writing the memoir. And yet I discovered something curious once the book was released: even though it’s my story on the page, readers see it through the prisms of their own lives. For all of a memoir’s exhibitionism, your tale is interpreted by readers to suit their own needs, their own experiences, their own journey. It’s a type of literary scavenging: they keep what serves them and reuse it for new purposes.

But it is still your story. And in telling mine, I grew closer to Dad. He became not more dead, as Lewis warned, but something entirely different. He became more real."

*

Thank you to the lovely and talented Tara Lakowski, who introduced me to Budd. Lakowski's story collection, Bystanders, will be published by the Santa Fe Writers Project next year.

One Night in Puno

Please find my illustrious publication at yourlifeisatrip.com!

It's an excerpt of my book...so enjoy! The book is forthcoming. 

Thanks for the limelight, Judith.

Meanwhile, wishing everyone....a spring! Just any old spring would be great!

Love, Kate

Our Lives are all Trips!

Check it!
A recent Santa Fe find.

Judith Fein and Ellen Barone run yourlifeisatrip.com, which features a massive collection of high quality travel narrative. This is concise (1000 word max) travel writing that takes you around the globe and across the street and, in Austin's case, into a wintry Virginia. 

Thanks for a great find, Austin!

And meanwhile, dear readers, stay tuned.

My life is a trip, too, even though I can't remember the last time I left the land of enchantment.

And so my short essay on Pune, Peru will be available on the site by March 26!

Wishing all a happy spring.

Love, Kate

Brilliant, he.

My brother!

He's funnier than me but maybe not as artful. In any case, read his clever little blog on living in a small Austrian town....located here!

And, here's an excerpt I just adore, on telling people where he's from (New York, the state, not the city...). I can totally relate! New York: an easy thing to say, an easier thing to misinterpret.

"From here, it’s an all out crapshoot. Duck and cover, I’m just hoping to make it out alive and with my dignity intact. I would say 1 in 6 people have heard of the Olympic Village. If they haven’t, I can usually buy a few precious seconds with some mumbo-jumbo about the stupid movie series that stars a 40 meter bulletproof alligator. If they’re still trying to rub it in that I couldn’t tell the Upper East Side from the Staten Island Ferry, I throw out my Hail Mary:

“You know, I’m not from The City, friend. I’m from a little town up North, sandwiched between the Canadian border and the Akwesanse Mohawk Casino, you know, the North Country’s favorite playground? It’s a sacred spot, where Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley wed, and where the Sioux Indians’ spirit was finally broken. We’re a proud folk up there, that’s for sure, say– have you heard of Sarah Palin? I’m such a fan…”

By this point, they’ve started to admit their own fault. They’re backing away slowly, apologizing for having gone on and on in heavy dialect about their great seats at Cats."

Extraordinary Writing by the Lovely Christine

How beautiful, this heartfelt post, from one Stevens Fellow to another.

An excerpt:

 I know I should go to the museums, but all I want to do is ride down the streets. When I finally stuffed the mint floss into my pannier I thought about how buying a piece of fruit at the Bandu Market would sometimes take me 45 minutes because I would stop and explore every stall. Is this what Mary Elvira Stevens meant when she stipulated that fellows should have a “deep love of beauty?” Has traveling alone impaired your time management skills?

- By Christine Grant, as posted on her awesome blog, Shift. You can read all about her project there; she's a great writer and a brave soul - and she's incredibly generous, too! (She once gave me my very own corner of her tiny room in northern Thailand for upwards of two months. It was fun.)


I miss you, dear girl! xx

An Hour Like Water

Originally published in The Best Women's Travel Writing

Alfonso is half an hour late. He doesn’t call to tell me this, nor does he apologize when he finally shows up where we've arranged to meet, on the corner in front of the convenience store. He just kisses me on the cheek and asks, Do you like Arabian food? He asks it in Spanish, and I have to get him to repeat the question two more times. Árabe is the word I’m not getting, not with the way he crushes the r and turns the b into a v.

Should we be talking in English? He asks me in English, after the third and final attempt. I pout. It was just that one word! I protest, and he laughs and unlocks the car. The door on my side scrapes the curb as I pull it shut—You sank the car! He says, but he’s not angry. He’s used to the screech of the door against the high sidewalk, and jokes that if I weighed just a little bit less, the car wouldn’t sink so bad. I know he is teasing, though, because he told me the other night that I should eat more, and ordered us both desserts.

I decide, as we drive down Godoy Cruz, past the horse-racing track and the massive banyan tree, past the lime-green Chinese restaurant and the tiny gas station, that I won’t be mad that he showed up late. Even if I said something, he’d just remind me that it wasn’t his fault—I don’t have a watch, remember? He’d say. And I’d have to admit that I’ve used the same excuse. Anyway, I tell myself, leaning back in my seat and watching the lights of Palermo flicker past, isn’t the strange slow motion of time the sweetest thing about this place? Alfonso turns up the music, explaining that the man singing is an Alaskan guy who grew up in Buenos Aires. We listen to his raspy, folksy voice, and cruise up and down the nighttime streets.

The bars we speed past are crowded with trendy twenty-somethings. Knee-length stiletto boots; tight jeans and leather jackets. The girls have this hair, this amazing long hair that reaches down past their ass, and the guys hold their women close to them, kissing them, eyes closed. We drive down the series of streets named after Central American countries—Nicaragua and Costa Rica, Honduras. I tell Alfonso, in Spanish, that I like this part of town because the streets remind me how far I have come. Which one’s your favorite? He asks, and I tell him, without hesitating, Nicaragua. I tell him I liked the heat there, I liked the poets, I liked the blue waters of the Corn Islands and the way, in the evening, the sun made everything pink.

*

The Arabian restaurant, when we arrive, is so jammed that we have to add our names to a long list, a list that a bald man holds with importance at the door. He is smoking, smoking and ushering people in and out, and there must be thirty or forty people waiting for him to call their names, standing there beneath the plastic awning in the sweet, unexpected warmth of this springtime night.

Let’s go for a beer, Alfonso suggests, after we’ve added our name. How long is the wait? I ask, and he tells me it’s enough time to have a beer. I don’t push it. This is like him ringing the doorbell late and not apologizing; this is the way time works here. It’s like Harrison, one of the other English teachers at Conviven, told me on the bus ride home the other day: Time is more fluid here, he’d said, just like everything else. He’d grinned, then kissed me on the cheek and jumped off the bus—his stop. I watched him lope away with his long legs and cropped hair, his blue eyes, down the cobblestone street and out of sight.

Although the Arabian restaurant was jammed inside and out, the streets around here are empty. We peer into the windows of bars that are silent, the stools and counters gleaming and unused. Spooky, I say. It’s a vicious cycle, Alfonso tells me. The place is empty, so no one goes in. No one goes in, and the place stays empty. I practice saying ‘vicious cycle’ in Spanish; Alfonso makes fun of my accent. I remind him that at least we’re speaking in Spanish, right? He shrugs, nods, and takes my arm. Here, he says, and points to a little pizza joint with a couple of outdoor tables and a few waiters standing around smoking.

           

Alfonso orders a big bottle of beer, which comes with little dishes of chips and peanuts and crackers. I’m starving, Alfonso admits, pouring the beer into squat jelly jars and then reaching for a handful of peanuts. He asks me if I’ve eaten, and I tell him I have—Hours ago, I say. I can’t wait until midnight for dinner, I joke, and he shrugs. Is it midnight already? He asks, and checks his wrist for a watch that isn’t there. Then he laughs and grabs for another handful of peanuts, tossing one at me, aiming for my shirt’s v-shaped neckline.

I like Alfonso because he tosses peanuts at me, and he doesn’t care about time. He doesn’t get stressed about it, even though he works as an attorney and knows his minutes are on the clock. I like him because he chats with the tall, African-looking waiter who comes out and refills our glasses of beers and our dishes of peanuts and chips. The two of them guess where the other is from, ignoring me, and I like this. Everyone chats here; everyone has the time and the interest for a brief conversation. We finish our beers and pay the bill. Our table will be ready now, Alfonso says.

And it is. We go back to the Arabian place and wait just two minutes at the door, the patio still jammed, until the man with the list and the cigarette calls our name. He doesn’t show us in, he just directs us inside and up the stairs. Take the table with silverware on it, he says, and checks his list to call out the next name. After we sit, Alfonso orders without consulting the menu, and this is something I like, too. He rattles off a list of dishes, and asks for a bottle of wine. Hot, thin bread arrives in a napkin-covered basket, and sparkling water, and then the plates come, one after the other, now stuffed grape leaves, now falafel, now a type of meat pie and a type of cheese casserole and a tart, lemony salad. The wine is cold and tastes like flowers and oranges both. We eat and eat, using our fingers and not our forks, and after a while baklava arrives for dessert, and possibly the best coffee I’ve ever had, sweet without being sugary, grainy and rich without being cloying. Every bite requires you to close your eyes, because with them open, your senses are overwhelmed. I am stuffed, I am sleepy; I’m in heaven.

Just before we leave, I check my watch. It’s 3 AM. The restaurant remains full; the waiters hurry around. I catch Alfonso looking at me; he shakes his head. I pull my shirtsleeve down over my wrist to cover my watch.

Time is a different animal here, Alfonso says. It’s another thing altogether, than what you know. He pulls me closer as we make our way though the restaurant, towards the door, squeezing between tables and chairs, diners and servers and the man with the list. So forget it, Alfonso whispers, and hustles me out the door.

And he is right. Here, time’s a river, and because it moves like water, it would be stupid to try and cling. The sun setting down doesn’t mark another hour; the thing is the glimmer, the long shadows of the trees. And this night is not the minutes; it’s not the morning growing closer. It’s the moonlight, it’s the coffee, it’s the not-so-distant summer on the wind.

The Unfinished City

"The Jardin Botanico was crawling with cats, hundreds and hundreds of them. They crept over everything, collected, preened.

The city would abruptly change the subject. I had felt this from the start. You were walking along a smooth Palermo street lined with bars and shops and would suddenly stumble into a wasteland, grass and dirt. Or you looked through a doorway into a huge empty hole. It was an unfinished city, but not only that. It seemed interminable, an interminable job. This was also what I liked."

Excerpted from The Foreigners, by Maxine Swann

Maxine Swann, a friend of Donigan's and the author of Serious Girls, Flower Children and The Foreigners, lives in Buenos Aires. She's been awarded a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Prize, and the Ploughshares Cohen Award.  The Foreigners, which takes place here in BA, does a nice job of capturing how this city is - always shifting, dark and beautiful both. Plus, Swann (or at least her protagonist, who I'm willing to bet holds a biographical resemblance) seems to be a bold traveller, sometimes a little reckless, and that reminds me of someone I know.

 The author

 Random House

Missing you all, as usual. Happy Labor Day weekend! Besitos.

Travel in Turbulent Times

I'll preface this post by saying I'm ashamed to have missed this NYTimes article. I have no defense; at the time it came out, I was making my way into Ecuador, where I'd stay put for three months and have plenty of time to read The Times.

I'm also ashamed of my dear readership! Is this because you have to pay to read the Times now? Did none of you stumble across this article and think of me? For shame! All of us.

OK, enough scolding...LOOK!
An article on travel by Paul Theroux...and here is a fine, fine excerpt:

“Don’t go there,” the know-it-all, stay-at-home finger wagger says of many a distant place. I have heard it my whole traveling life, and in almost every case it was bad advice.

Oh, Paul. Oh Paul Paul Paul. Truer words were never spoken. When do you want to meet for a drink?

Read the full article here...if you can afford it!

Finding Tango

We discover, Else and I, a market that reminds me of the markets up north. Of course I am grateful, because didn’t I miss them? This San Telmo market has piles and piles of produce at one end, and stray dogs milling around. Beggars cower in corners and ladies sell clothes and hot corn on the cob. We come in from the cold to smell the sweet oranges and prod at the avocados, which are the biggest I’ve seen since Xela. Palvas, I call them, and the man behind the scales corrects me, grinning. Paltas, he says, and slices one open for us to try. Palta is the Quechua name. The avocado is watery and bland; the bigger ones always are. We buy bananas instead.

We sit at the bar of a tiny market restaurant that serves plates of French fries and eggplant, bowls of steaming vegetable soup and small, hard rolls of white bread. Chunky lowballs filled to the brim with red wine. The waiter practices his English with us; Else is hard to understand, he admits, and she explains that she’s from Australia, where the words come out rounder, the consonants not so hard. For our food and wine, we are charged five dollars, and we slide off of our coveted stools as soon as we take our last sip. People are waiting for their own glasses of wine, their own plates of media-lunas and bowls of hot soup.

The front of the market is where the antiques are: here are boxes and boxes of faded postcards from the twenties and warped records to sort through. Brooches with fake diamonds and rubies; ribbon, once white, now faded to golden. Old shoes that cost more than a new pair in the city center, because of how carefully they were crafted years ago and how soft the leather has become. From old record players, music spins over us, and so inside here, it could be any year. No cell phones cry out, and everything’s covered in a thin layer of dust. The men who sell these old, worn things wear berets and smoke pipes. They glance over the edge of their newspapers at Else, who runs her fingers lightly over the beaten silver bracelets and pewter spoons.

Outside, because it is Sunday, this market runs on up and down the street, encompassing fifteen blocks, or maybe twenty. Here are the artisans I’ve met in every city I’ve visited; they have, as they always do, their bracelets with the unpolished stones laid out on plywood tables and blankets spread over the pavement. They drag on their cigarettes and look up at us with lazy eyes. Old women sell antique dishes: plates engraved with gold type, and cups and saucers painted with lilies. There are the ladies who have knit thick, luminous scarves, and Else buys one on impulse. She chooses a scarf with skeins of blue, of heather gray, and of sage green, and she pays the woman and then wraps it around her neck, smiling. Much better, she says, even though the wine from our late lunch still keeps us warm.

And then we turn the corner and here is a crowd packed in tight around music that is playing. This music sways, it lifts and bends around us, it is the even strum of a guitar and, beneath that, a fiddle’s high melody. We push through; it is street tango. The old man is smiling like he’s never been so happy as right now; he guides a woman around, a woman who wears too much makeup, and together they turn, she lifts her leg at the knee just a little and then sets it down, drags her toe along the ground just so, exactly in time with the catch of the song, and that movement, so perfect, suddenly chills me. I have never seen tango like this. What I know of the dance is what I learned as a skater, an ice dancer: the doubled-over beat, the way I pointed the toe and lifted the leg, moved it just a fraction higher with the next beat, always my partner Michael’s hand into pressing mine and his other arm tight around my lower back. No, that wasn’t like this street melody, because how, on ice, can you make your movements so slow? How can you shift only fractions, the way they do? How can you ever move like these two who spin on a small red carpet with their eyes closed. Maybe they’re strangers; maybe they do this every Sunday. In any case, the way they dance convinces me they’re in love.

Later, I will go to the center of town and see a floor filled with dancers. I will watch the women, their high heels clicking, their men guiding them rapturously across the floor. I will see the way they drag their toe along the ground, wrap their left leg around their partners’ right, move their hips just a little to make way for his step forward. God, the way they listen to the music, listen with their bodies and not their brains. It’s like they are breathing the sound of the violins, and the cello's deep chords. Each time I see tango again, I know, it will make me feel this same breathless way. I will feel the chills, I will close my eyes, every time for the rest of my life. I didn’t know it was possible to move like that, so free and careful both, and I never knew the body could merge so smooth into a palette of musical notes.


http://www.tangobuenosaires.gob.ar/campeonato10/web/en/tango/festival_mundial.html

What we miss

Homesickness can be traced back to Odysseus from Homer’s The Odyssey. Odysseus wept and rolled on the hard ground thinking of home.

Wikipedia

It is my fault, I know, for coming this far and for staying this long. It is my fault for choosing to live in this city, which has turned out to be more massive than any cement strip I’ve ever seen. And it’s my fault for being a writer and thus for needing long hours alone, not just to put my hands to the keys, to the page, but also to think, to walk, to read. And so it’s my fault for shutting my door to the friendly faces in the hostels, and for preferring, sometimes, to eat alone, because it is then that I best can observe. I chose this, I have to remember, even though the hours feel very long these days, for I am lonely.

I recently read an article Philip Graham shared with me; a well-known blogger was giving advice to an eager mother on how best to foster her daughter’s impulse to write. Give your child time to be bored, the author suggested, and I truly cannot think of better advice. Give your child books, and give your child time: this is how you teach someone to imagine. Let them grow up, perhaps, on a quiet road far from town; give them a summer without a job, and a list of chores, and when they’ve finished, send them outside or else up to their room, where you know they’ll only find books to entertain them there. It’s what my mother did, after all; she let words wrap themselves around me so now they run as close to my blood as my skin. Words, my words, are my home.

Still, I wonder whether homesickness is always going to be part of the picture. Without it, anyway, would I be able to write? Don’t you need the sadness to make your writing real; don’t you need this sickness, sometimes, because it’s the most interesting thing you can put on the page? Don’t you want the beautiful things to run alongside something ugly? Everything grows deeper that way. I have always been prone to homesickness, easily swept up in nostalgia, and perhaps, though it’s a torment, I am lucky. How blessed I am, after all, to have had a childhood so sweet I still dream about it, and to still have both parents, whose faces I continue to see everywhere.

And I know what the cure is, anyway. I’ve found you can’t let people heal you, because sometimes they’re just as sad as you are, and they can leave you at any moment. They’ll come and touch your heart, make you laugh, but when they weep in the night or get in trouble far away, it will only make the missing worse. No, the mountains are the thing, and if I can’t have those, the wind in the trees will do. It’s the outdoors that soothes: it’s always been that way, ever since I moved into my first apartment in Cambridge and realized that the walls we’d spend so many hours painting were sometimes just bricks, tight and dark and cold with the power to choke me. That’s the way cities are; sometimes, sitting in your room with the sounds of the cars and the voices a constant, you wonder whether you’ve ever felt so alone.

I look up homesickness on the Internet today. Most of the pages that come up first are for parents looking to help their children, who they’ve sent away to summer camp. Or kids from Midwestern states who seem never to have left that town until college; they’re the ones who weep in the night while outside the parties rage. So I am a child, I think to myself, but read on. My college roommate, who grew up in a string of cosmopolitan cities in Europe and, later, in the metropolitan Northeast, seemed never to be homesick. Sure, the depression we discovered came so easily at an all-women’s college in wealthy suburbia hit us both, but she didn’t look at the photos her mother had taken of her home, the way I had. I feel listless, she’d say, and zip up her tall black boots and go out. For her, the city healed, the bars that she entered and the music that pumped late at night. The cafes, the traffic—this, after all, was her home, while for me, nothing felt farther.

Wikipedia suggests that those who suffer from homesickness should practice being alone. I read that and sigh, for of course it won’t help. Haven’t I slept in foreign hostels, in rented rooms, in cold and unknown cities, for nine months now? Haven’t I had enough practice? I’m still no better at coping, and looking out the window down at the people who rush about, their plans on their mind and cups of maté in their hands, only makes it worse. It reminds me that I’m my own boss, I must work alone, and until I get an agent, or discuss my book with Donigan over dinner, there will be no meetings I have to attend, no after-work cocktails with my co-workers. You are here doing something, my brain tells my trembling heart every day. Be brave.

I realize, too, that it isn’t just my family I miss. It’s the other countries I have seen; the warmth in Nicaragua that made living so easy, and the way the stars came out, clear and white, in the hot night. It’s the way I got to know Xela, got to know Quito, and it’s the drive outside of Baños that I took with Raphael, clutching at his waist as the wind whipped our hair. Those dripping tunnels, and the waterfall we finally reached. It’s the classroom on the hill, looking over Quito’s colonial center, and it’s even that Mariscal house, where in the long hours of the afternoon, the little birds flew in through the open door and pecked at the crumbs in the kitchen. It’s the buses where I slept, where I wept, where I nibbled bread. It’s the high-up Peruvian towns, where I knew no one.

And so it helps to know that someday, I’ll miss this place too. That’s the sweet thing about homesickness; it makes it easier to fall in love. I’ll miss this funny house, where Alex and Vicky peer at the television and shout at their cat, letting him inside and out, inside and out. I’ll miss the wide, dirty streets, and the way the neighborhoods shift and breathe, now green, now black, now frightening, now bright with the light of that yellow café on the corner. This day will go by, just like all the rest of them, and in the meantime I’ll take walks alone, and I’ll watch out the restaurant window. I’ll go home in my dreams, and when I wake in the morning, I’ll start the day here. My conversations, when I have them, will taste sweet, for already how rich I feel in the hours when the homesickness lapses and a Buenos Aires moment fills me up.

Palermo Home

To Donigan and Holly

How sad it was to leave you today, to leave your home and your white cat and those long, wide windows that look out onto the street. How I wept after Holly stood in the doorway to my bedroom, one hand on the doorjam, and told me she’d miss me. Don’t leave, she’d said, her smile tired and thin because of her cold. Do you know how long it’s been, since someone asked me to stay? How long, too, since someone’s sat on my bed and watched me pack my things, since they’ve put food in a bag for me - chocolate, empanadas, all the things that I love. For the road, Holly said to me, adding crackers to the bag. This is the way my mother packed food every time I’d leave the house to drive back to Wellesley, then back to Cambridge. It’s the way she brushed tears from her eyes as she handed me the bag that last time, when I hugged my family and then drove my car to my grandmother’s house in Connecticut, where it’s sitting now, waiting for me to come home.

God, this year’s awful goodbyes. If I’d known how many there would be before I left, I don’t think I could have borne it. It isn’t just the hillsides, the little towns, the cities where I lost myself and fell in love. I’ve said good-bye to the countries that showed me Spanish, and endless, winding markets, and what real suffering means. I’ve said good-bye to people who taught me how best to climb this region’s many mountains, and where to find the nicest fruit, the biggest, cheapest cut of meat, the coldest beer. I’ve said good-bye to little schools on crumbling blocks, and to the rambling brick building where, for three months, I taught English to those Ecuadorian kids. I cried and kissed my parents when they put me on that bus to San Jose; I said good-bye to Kendra, to Hilary, to Carlos and to Pamela, to Gaby. I said good-bye to Raphael and wondered when I’d see him next; I kissed Eloesa’s mouth and walked away. I have turned my back on so many places, so many people and so many homes. Little rooms, little stoves, and tiny mats where I was told, so many times, to leave my shoes.

Today I struggled to close my pack as Donigan looked on. It gets bigger every time I leave a place, I told him, and he started to rummage for another bag I could borrow for the shoes and books I couldn’t fit. It’s just for while you cross town, he said. I left today because I thought it best to give you your space; I didn’t feel right about living without paying, tripping over your life with Holly, but I didn’t think that leaving would make me this sad. I just didn’t think it would feel like family this soon. I waited so long to come to you, and when I finally got here, you opened your lives to me. You gave me this bed with the smooth yellow sheets; you gave me hot water, hot food. Never once did you say a cross word, a cruel thing, and always you told me how much you respect me. You praised my writing so much that I turned red and begged to change the subject, and you never once asked for me to pay. And so I know it was time to leave, time to work, time to push myself a little farther past the white, quiet walls of your apartment, but I hope you both know that I will always be grateful for the way you told me, as I walked out the door, that I could always come home.  I’ll never forget you, do you know that?

And so now here I am, in this living room just south of San Telmo. The second floor looks over a busy street that’s lined with bank machines and green-grocers and tiny delis jammed with cheese and wine. The window of my rented room watches the overgrown courtyard below, and that window has tiny cracks that let the wind in, so Alex and Vicky, the two women who live here, show me how to use the heater in the night. They microwave an empanada for me, and ask me whether I can figure out the MP3 player they bought just yesterday. Hijo de puta, Vicky swears; she is too old, she tells me, to learn to use such stupid things. She fiddles with it still while Alex washes the dishes from lunch and then hauls their big black cat onto her lap. 
How old is he? I ask Alex. 
How old is Pirouchi? Alex asks Vicky. 
Stop screaming! Vicky replies. He’s seven. Alex snorts. He’s five, she assures me, and Vicky, from where she sits with the tiny MP3 player in her hands, murmurs Six. Alex nods. 
He’s six, she confirms, and then kisses Pirouchi on his furry black head.

So far from Palermo, I feel. Here the buildings are closer, the people poorer, the grocery stores cheaper and dirtier and crowded. Here, Vicky and Alex talk over each other, finishing each other’s sentences and explaining to me what you can buy at the tienda across the street. Puta madre, they shout at the television, as the male politicians of the world parade past. And I wonder how Holly is feeling now. Are the antibiotics beginning to work? Have you started the movies I left there? And is Sophie sleeping on Donigan’s lap; is he holding his magazine over her? This is your home here, Donigan had said, and so I will practice my Spanish with Alex and Vicky, and after I do that, I’ll come home.

Seeing Buenos Aires

Dear ones,

Below are some images of funky BA. It's a city of gardens, of grafitti, of endless cement. Oh, how I wish you were here. But...David and Dad arrive in T-minus three weeks!!! I can't wait I can't wait I can't wait.

Besitos!!!

 Peronista success...and obvious tactics

 Street tango! So glorious.