by Natalia Rachel Singer

“I have come to see that all literature is a form of travel writing. We engage with the world through sensory rich language and whether each place we bring to the page is one we’ve seen or only imagined, we’re always speculating about its contours and customs.”

That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.
―Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

Cold floor. Hot face. A child crouches at the window watching the sky. Wishing to inhabit another body, another lifeform, another time and place. To be the blue heron, posing, taunting from shore. Or the branches moving in sync, then still. Or the river where they meet, bird and willow. Sometimes at night now when the outside comes in, I remember that child, those first longings.

Once upon a time an ambitious girl left home. On that perilous, stop-start voyage out she could not understand why she was so often condescended to, and not just by men. Where is love, she asked? Where is the sailboat? The menorah-lit window? Another hobo to share a canteen with after hopping the train? Run. Jump. Ride. It’s hot in those leather chaps.

Leaving home was the first step in the long journey for which she was shockingly unprepared and continuously amazed. A journey latticed with Do Not Enter signs. She tried Wonder Woman belts, outlined her eyes with kohl, raged against broken systems. No one wants to hear this. Sometimes she changed the subject but never the voice, that old hooligan.

At twenty, I was the youngest attendee of a writers’ conference in Connecticut. I was soon befriended by the oldest writer in attendance, a poet and aspiring novelist. Only she and I weren’t writers, we found out; we were women writers. My workshop teacher, high on the success of his third novel, scheduled my manuscript critique for after dinner in his room. He pointed to the imagery he liked, a line about the cat-shape a woman’s discarded sweater made on some man’s floor, then pointed to his bed. I could have fled, I should have fled, but I went along with it for the story. I thought everything was a story, even the final cocktail party where I hid out in the claw-tooth tub of some stranger’s mansion to sooth the pain of my first-ever UTI, and the grandma-age writer drove me to the ER, and the bill, which cost more than the conference itself, followed me around for years as if to say, remember me? unlike the novelist, who, for the duration of the workshop, never spoke to me again, and my story of early achievement and adventure turned into a cautionary tale: a story I never told anyone, until now.

In the Languedoc region of France I was drawn to the Cathar heretics who called out the pope and his bishops for their greed and bloodlust and hypocrisy and sought refuge in hilltop castle ruins where juniper, box, and rosemary perfumed the wind. They chanted their prayers as they jumped into the flames, insisting no one could tell them what to believe. Witnesses thought they still heard them singing long after their flesh was ash. A story came to me on one such hilltop. Contemporary star-crossed lovers, classmates, and a father and daughter encamped in this remote, medieval ruin. I saw the story as clearly as a feature-length film and the characters became my imaginary friends.

The couple who owned our Languedoc rental invited my husband and me over for drinks. We sat in their garden and talked about the renovations. As dusk gathered around us, the wife of the duo watched me watch backyard oak branches tremble in wind, purple petals gesture like hands, and said, “Vous êtes sensible à lieu, Madame.” You are sensitive to place. Some years later an editor turned down the novel I took half a dozen research trips to get right because it had too much France in it for an American audience.

In Varanasi the outside came in on our dirty shoes. Sometimes it was the cremation ghat where dogs foraged for charred human kneecaps and sadhus carried sacks of their own shit to the sacred river to unburden themselves. Grief was a second sky, a widow’s veil, smoke, beggars’ chants, incense in temple urns, the hope of bereaved pilgrims. Tea came in clay pots you could break on tile floors with a satisfying ping, chai its own currency, a city onto itself.

City walks past bison and cows and catcallers and rickshaw wallahs—“Ride, Madam?”—and Madam wanted to devour everything with her eyes, but how? To attempt to see everything at once is to see nothing at all. Nothing would have stopped her from coming here, not even the foreknowledge of falling ill after the Shiva priest made her sip blessed Ganges water, or near-strangulation from her long silk scarf caught in the spokes of the rickshaw bike.

I thought I came to India to write a story, something outside myself I could make by hand, but India became part of me instead. Now I have an altar in my writing room. Brass Hindu gods watch me churn cremation smoke into language, panic into fire. If we are composites of all the places we have lived and traveled, where does our truest inspiration dwell?

They say god speaks in tongues but god comes to me in stillness, the way my dog leans against me in sleep, and how when I listen without strain I hear what I need to know and can walk on ice and sooth myself on moonless nights when I press my hot face against the window hoping for a sign, until finally my own heartbeat reminds me that all this panic about failure is the path I’ve chosen, and there is no why.

A well-meaning friend suggested that if I gave up writing, I would have more free time. I could see more concerts and plays. I could take my dog to volunteer at hospice. I could hike more mountains and stay in better touch with my friends. I was so shocked and enraged when she said this, I couldn’t speak for the rest of our walk.

To live without writing would be, for me, to drift through the world without inhabiting it fully. Moving from room to room to dog walk to seminar table to departure lounge unaccompanied by the voice, that old crank singing the hilltops and rivers, birds and sparring humans, cosmologies and migration patterns, mating calls and burial customs.

Perhaps life really would be simpler if I could quelch all the yearning and striving, stop shape-shifting myself into other times and places. But then I remember that I haven’t yet been to Karpathos, Berlin, Fez, Copenhagen, Istanbul, or Kathmandu, and there are six unopened Mead composition books on the bookshelf beside my altar in my writing space.

This essay was supposed to be about courting the world—the voyage out—not the word, yet the word persists, stubborn and wild. Hope is not the kite that glides above my beach but the jagged shells at my feet that I stomp through because there’s no practical way to step around them. The knowledge that this world that is too much with us travels at its own velocity, and it’s just when we think we will never reconcile ourselves to its cruelties that grace arrives. This morning I cross the lawn to my studio with my dog and my mug of coffee, open the door, and it’s all there: the turquoise-and-rose swirls of the Kashmiri stair runner I custom-ordered in Dharamshala, the picture books of château ruins from France, the brass gods on the altar. I see the amber of my dog’s eyes as she follows me up to the loft, the wings of the great blue heron outside on the riverbed, and as the voice inside insists some more, I climb to where these dirty shoes will take me.

Place has always taken center stage for me in my work. The narrator of a novel I’m completing this year is a travel writer, and in my investigations into her character and back story I’ve mined my own past for places on the map where our lives intersect. I have come to see that all literature is a form of travel writing. We engage with the world through sensory rich language and whether each place we bring to the page is one we’ve seen or only imagined, we’re always speculating about its contours and customs. Like so many of us, I had to cancel a number of planned trips these past couple years, including some research trips for the novel, so instead of doing my usual due diligence of fact-checking my work by actual leg work, I employed speculative nonfiction techniques that stretched my capacity to delineate here from there. Imagining yourself into a landscape that feels far-off via time or geographical distance is also a journey to the unknown places within.

In this essay I was exploring the journey out and the journey in at the same time. As a woman writer, it’s never easy to work and travel in a world filled with misogyny and danger, but what keeps me going are two things besides my innate stubbornness: the eagerness to go back to my studio each morning and lose myself in the task of pushing words across a page, and curiosity about the world I’ll find there.

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Natalia Rachel Singer’s most recent nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, Speculative Nonfiction (Issue 2), and an anthology of essays about the war on terror, Globalizing Collateral Language, edited by John Collins and Somdeep Sen. The author of Scraping by in the Big Eighties, she is currently finishing a new collection of essays, Stubborn Roots, and a novel set in 2020, Origin Stories. As a professor of creative writing and environmental literature at St. Lawrence University, she has led study programs in France and India.