A Traveler, Not a Tourist
After nearly seven months on the road, I’m back. Back home, that is. Home right smack dab in the bower of the nation’s flyover breadbasket, the Midwest. This is not where I intended to live, but as any writer will tell you (fledgling or otherwise), one can only control just so much.
Where was I? Living and working in the U.K., from January through April, and then traveling (footloose and fancy-free, or as footloose as one can be with family in tow) through Italy, Crete, and Turkey, with brief stops in the Lake Geneve corners of Switzerland and France.
My city, on returning, seems less of a city. It’s insufficiently dense, with too many lawns and very little traffic. Evansville may be typical of much of the U.S., but it’s a hybrid, as metropoli go, a sprawl more green than paved. No wonder we have such a lousy public transit system.
When one is away from the routines and comforts of home (the designed life that home implies), simple answers to questions like, “So, did you have a great trip?” do not signify. This trip was far too long to qualify as mere vacation. Perhaps my friend Michalis, on Crete, said it best, when we bemoaned being mistaken for “common” tourists. “You’re not tourists,” he said. “You’re travelers.”
Michalis really knows how to stroke my aging ego.
Writing-wise, my absence was not a total disaster.
To learn about where to find all of my current writing, please visit the Anti-Blog at my website by clicking on this link:
http://www.markrigney.net/Rigney/Blog...
If you’re in Santa Barbara, CA, this November (the 12th through the 22nd), fill a seat for Santa Monica City College’s production of Ten Red Kings. I’m thrilled to have a first college production in hand for this play, and with a little luck, I’ll be there myself to see it.
I’m also pleased to report that later this fall, I will have cracked the covers of The Bellevue Literary Review for the third time, this time with an ecology-minded piece, “From Utah To the Promised Land.” BLR isn’t an online publication any more than is The Beloit Fiction Journal, but if you have a mind (and a spare dollar) to support small presses, this fall would be a mighty fine time to pony up.
Did I mention my two reprints? The first is in Terror Train, which Goodreads folk seem to really like, and it’s disgusting and nasty and just about the attitudinal opposite of what I usually write. “Customs” first appeared in Day Terrors.
I will make an effort to update here on occasion, usually by bowdlerizing whatever updates and rants I post on my own site. A more complete and possibly riskier version of this blog will typically appear there (see the link, above).
Onward -- and peace to all.
Where was I? Living and working in the U.K., from January through April, and then traveling (footloose and fancy-free, or as footloose as one can be with family in tow) through Italy, Crete, and Turkey, with brief stops in the Lake Geneve corners of Switzerland and France.
My city, on returning, seems less of a city. It’s insufficiently dense, with too many lawns and very little traffic. Evansville may be typical of much of the U.S., but it’s a hybrid, as metropoli go, a sprawl more green than paved. No wonder we have such a lousy public transit system.
When one is away from the routines and comforts of home (the designed life that home implies), simple answers to questions like, “So, did you have a great trip?” do not signify. This trip was far too long to qualify as mere vacation. Perhaps my friend Michalis, on Crete, said it best, when we bemoaned being mistaken for “common” tourists. “You’re not tourists,” he said. “You’re travelers.”
Michalis really knows how to stroke my aging ego.
Writing-wise, my absence was not a total disaster.
To learn about where to find all of my current writing, please visit the Anti-Blog at my website by clicking on this link:
http://www.markrigney.net/Rigney/Blog...
If you’re in Santa Barbara, CA, this November (the 12th through the 22nd), fill a seat for Santa Monica City College’s production of Ten Red Kings. I’m thrilled to have a first college production in hand for this play, and with a little luck, I’ll be there myself to see it.
I’m also pleased to report that later this fall, I will have cracked the covers of The Bellevue Literary Review for the third time, this time with an ecology-minded piece, “From Utah To the Promised Land.” BLR isn’t an online publication any more than is The Beloit Fiction Journal, but if you have a mind (and a spare dollar) to support small presses, this fall would be a mighty fine time to pony up.
Did I mention my two reprints? The first is in Terror Train, which Goodreads folk seem to really like, and it’s disgusting and nasty and just about the attitudinal opposite of what I usually write. “Customs” first appeared in Day Terrors.
I will make an effort to update here on occasion, usually by bowdlerizing whatever updates and rants I post on my own site. A more complete and possibly riskier version of this blog will typically appear there (see the link, above).
Onward -- and peace to all.
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