What's your favorite writing about a place?
Travels with Charley, May 2024
Hi readers,
Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.
Where I’m living
The Pacific Northwest in late springtime is magical: the clouds part and everything blooms. I’ve never seen such a lush place! Tulips and lilacs and magnolias bursting out from front gardens, dogwood blossoms carpeting the sidewalks… It’s glorious. Find me catcalling blooms throughout Southeast. (“Oh, damn, just look at that tulip!” I say to myself on my lunchtime walk, stopping to take my one thousandth flower close-up of the day.)
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It’s hard to know how to talk about the genocide in Gaza, except to continue to say that every death is a tragedy and the murder of so many innocent people, especially so many children, is unimaginable, and that it’s unconscionable that our elected leaders and institutions have enabled the Israeli military as its soldiers murder kids. I hope you’re continuing to reckon with it, to tell our representatives to do better, and to support the students showing us that throwing up our hands isn’t good enough. Also, when changing the minds of politicians feels hopeless, remember that we can concretely help individual people survive by donating to individual campaigns. (Here’s one link for that.) When I order takeout because I’m feeling tired, or buy new shorts or an expensive plane ticket, I’m trying to think about giving to those who need money because of what my elected leaders have enabled. I’m trying to donate enough so that I really notice.
What I’m reading
I can’t remember the last time a book made me laugh as much and as loudly as Reboot by Justin Taylor. It’s so funny, so smart, so layered. It reads like it’s narrated by a cross between the lit mag editor from your philosophy section who corners you at a party to talk about their blog and the tired super-senior smoking a cigarette on the stoop outside, which, no spoilers, it kind of is. Anyway, read it:
Precisely what she saw in me, then or now, was obscure to me, but that’s because I mostly hate myself. Therapy had taught me to say that plainly, but I was still working out what to do about it. You are worthy of love, I thought to myself, as the recessed panel reestablished itself and Grace stepped out of her jeans.
“Yeah, duh,” Grace said. “But thanks for clarifying.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I said the quiet part loud. And I didn’t mean you. But I mean of course you are, too. We all are.”
“I know you’ve had a hard time,” she said. “I’ve had a hard time, too. And I know this is random and weird. But can we just, for the next little while, focus on the subject at hand?”
“Yes,” I said. The roof of my mouth was atingle—GMO healing? I hoped so. It didn’t seem like I was going to bleed when we kissed at least. Maybe the burn hadn’t been that bad after all. I pulled off my shirt, hopefully sexily. We met each other in the middle of the room, fumbled and tumbled, familiarly, rebooting. I focused. The subject was at hand.
An especially vital book to read right now from Kaveh Akbar — I hope it will change how you think about statistics and the loss of a human life, as it has for me. Also, poets write such beautiful novels, there are so many sentences you can tumble through, like this one (Martyr!):
We held the song’s preemptive nostalgia between us like a candle, swaying as its flame smocked the wick, our faces illuminated and flickering in it, that flame, yearning, idiot yearning, yearning so strong it bends you, buckles you, like waves of miracles.
I didn’t know a book about motherhood could be so bleak and funny1, but I should’ve known that if anyone can walk that high-wire, it’s Rachel Cusk (A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother):
I have observed several times an expression of polite, horrified surprise on the faces of new mothers, as if they had just opened an inappropriate Christmas present: clearly they were unprepared.
And a classic description from one of my all-time favorites, Laurie Colwin (Happy All the Time):
He was bald and his face had the naked, political sensuality seen on the busts of Roman generals.
If you’re interested in more of what I’m reading, or a book recommendation, check out my storefront on Bookshop. (Buying through there sends me 10 percent of the sale, which I’ll add to my donations to help kids in Gaza get medical care.) As always, I’m also glad to give (and receive!) book recs.
What I’m wondering
What’s your favorite writing about a place? In particular, what’s your favorite writing about where you’re from?2 This is obviously a question dear to me as a lifelong proud, loud Northern California kid who named her newsletter Travels with Charley (RIP to my college idea of retracing the steps of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, lmk if you would be interested in sponsoring/publishing that book). It’s also a way I’ve understood the way land shapes identity in places I’ve lived and visited: Terry Tempest Williams on Utah, Claire Vaye Watkins on Nevada, N. Scott Momaday on New Mexico, Mary Oliver on Cape Cod, Jesse Nathan on Kansas, Mary Karr on East Texas and Christian Wallace on West Texas, Zadie Smith on north London, Kiran Desai on Delhi, Michael Crummey on Newfoundland, Maggie Shipstead on LA and José Vadi on southern California, Fernando Pessoa on Lisbon, Elena Poniatowska on Mexico City, Lorrie Moore on upstate New York… I’ll stop but please add to my canon. (Also, I’ve added those books to a “writing on place” list on my Bookshop profile.)
What I’m writing
If I talked to you in the past two months, I probably asked if you knew anyone who was about to retire. Out today in print for The New York Times Magazine, my story on what it means to retire in America, photographed by the brilliant Victor Llorente, told through the final workdays of seven people: Francis, who played the church organ for daily Mass from age 10 to age 83 (yes that is 73 years!); DJ Tony, Cincinnati’s King of Salsa; Roz, who has woken up at 1:30am to deliver morning traffic news to Chicagoans every weekday since 1989; Dave, a firefighter and union president who requested a bagpipe player herald the end of his last 24-hour shift; Sheila, who met her now-husband when he asked his cute mail carrier out on a date to the casino; Juliane, a former surgeon now in her eat-pray-love era; and Arthur, a fabric store owner passionate about custom draperies, vanilla frosting, and Robert Frost. It was an honor to learn about their lives (and a downer to learn about the gulf between how we imagine retirement and what the end of work usually looks like in the U.S., but that’s another story).
yours,
Charley
If you’re tired of reading bleak narratives about becoming a mother, I understand, and I suggest you read my brilliant friend Sanjena Sathian’s essay on why so many novels are obsessed with whether to have children right now.
shoutout to These Fifty States, hi Diana and Alec <3