—among other things, have kept me occupied these long months working on a book proposal for a travel memoir about the around-the-world trip the TravelJen blog documented. Hopefully you’ll have a book in your hand someday—that is, my book, not just any old book. (I know you already have other books, being the literate sorts that you are.) It includes a chapter called “Nuns on Bikes and Other Revelations” that picks up where the blog left off—in Poland. Later chapters cover a return trip to Warsaw on assignment, some surprisingly revelatory gambling in Atlantic City (who knew that was possible?), and happy happy Spring days in Istanbul with Steve, my indomitable HusbandMan.
What the final chapter is, I don’t know yet. The thing is, I’m still living the book. Life isn’t providing me any easy-to-tie-up narratives these days. But then again, when has it? The ends we draw on our stories are arbitrary, because the world goes on without them. It ignores our limits and our lines in the sand.
Henry James wrote: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere…the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.”
So that’s what I’ve been doing: drawing circles.
Until my as-yet-imaginary book is in your hand, you can read about some of my adventures by clicking on the months at right or searching in the little window below them for any of the countries I visited—China, Vietnam, Thailand, India, UAE, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, the UK, or Iceland. You can also try terms like “elephants,” “politics,” and “bondage.” The results will be both more and less exciting than you would think.
Also take a look at the photo galleries. I’m working on getting together a photography show, with actual, touchable (well, don’t touch em!), corporeal photographs hanging in frames on real, honest-to-god walls.
Thanks for reading. It’s been lovely.