No more papers to grade, no more telling other people how to improve their writing or what they should know about the regions of the world, or what the terror threat of the future might be: it is time to put down the chalk, white-board marker and PowerPoint and see what can be done with fifty-three years of life, forty-six or -seven of it "writing on the side."
Like Lindsay Davis, I intended to "run away to write," and have begun to do it: there is a book of saint's stories already published, an online essay, a chapter in a scholarly collection. There will be essays from time abroad, there are these two orphaned novels, and there will be the Great UnAmerican Novel, an historical thing from the days of Herodes Attikos.
But only because someone is taking a chance on me, and "keeping" me. Writers starve, otherwise. I will cling to the coattails of academe and go where another's research takes him, something like a human microbe, but a microbe armed with a keen interest in place and home-place, in cosmopolis: a cultural geographer-classicist-microbe; something like a fighting naturalist?
In January, there will be four weeks in Montparnasse to chronicle, and perhaps a drive from the top to the bottom of France, along the Via Agrippa, the results of which should appear in that Great UnAmerican Novel. February will begin three months back in Sendai, Japan: long enough to catch the best of sakura-sakura-sakura, the cherry blossoms appearing last of all in this colder end of Honshu. Perhaps there will be a pondering over the character and nature of Date Masamune, the ambiguously fascinating founder of Sendai.
There have been weeks and months spent in Italy: in Rome, the hometown of my grimy soul, in Tuscany, in Veneto, in Campania... Something of all that may show up here.
And perhaps here, someone may read about these things, and wonder about the spaces around us and the places we make of them for ourselves, and for one another.
