Travel – Nastasya Parker

The Wow Factor

This Week’s Bit of String: First fireworks

When my little Bear was 2.5 years old, my best friend and I took them to the 4th of July fireworks in the biggest local town. The Outing Club rocketed the fireworks from their ski slope over the surrounding valley, and we were running late as ever so were just trotting down the opposite hill when they started.

The colourful explosions put a skip into Bear’s step. They cried, “Wow! Oh, wow!”

I don’t think I’d ever heard them say that before. Such excitement is to be cherished and never forgotten, and fully warrants the nearly-taboo exclamation points.

Like the time after school once, a few years later when we were settled in the UK. Bear and I were walking back from town, they were maybe 6 years old, and a harvest moon rose, big and yellow. Bear stopped in the middle of recounting some kind of ds game or Star Wars scene to me, and broke into applause for the glorious natural phenomenon.

It’s so important to put ourselves in the way of moments that produce this type of reaction, even if it’s a daily event like the moonrise. We mustn’t lose our capacity to be impressed.

During half-term this week, I’ve mostly been working on writing and reading and weeding and cleaning. But I did abscond for a day and take the train to Bristol for a good wander. I climbed Brandon Hill and Cabot Tower to look out over the city, had a roasted white hot chocolate from Mrs. Potts chocolate house, and mooched around Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Plenty of Wow Factor there, from Assyrian tablets to ichthyosaur bones to all kinds of crystals and then more paintings and artefacts.

I could have stood for ages in front of James Tissot’s oil painting Les Adiuex (The Farewells) from 1871. The detail of the woman’s lace gloves! The clasped hands and the faces agonised by separation. But, there were other gallery visitors and it’s only fair they should see the painting as well.

Vacationing

When I was out and about in Bristol, there were lots of families trying to keep entertained there. Two siblings behind me on the train really liked the Arriva Train Care centre near Temple Meads station, with its sidings flanked by giant car wash brushes.

“That is so cool,” they kept saying.

And as I wandered at Bristol Harbour, I heard excited young people mistake the boats for the Titanic. At Millennium Square a boy on a scooter, maybe already in the early years of secondary school, freely told his friend, “I love these fountains.”

I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to hear kids enjoy themselves. At work we’re becoming pretty rundown. The students are so unmotivated and in a few cases, unpleasant. That said, my experience is mostly within the special needs area. Many of our students truly struggle, and exams ask almost too much from them.

*Obie, however, is ready to try being a writer and a scholar.*

Other students will experience school differently. On the last day before the break, quite a few of our statemented kids were out (there’s one boy in Year 10 who is marked “ill” on the last day of every single term—intriguing, no?) so I ended up in a top-set year 10 English class.

They were reviewing GCSE war poems they first learned last year, so I took a small group to go over “Kamikaze” by Beatrice Garland. It tells the story of a Japanese pilot who was supposed to commit kamikaze. But he changes his mind, and goes home instead. He chooses life, and his family can never forgive him. His neighbours and his wife, ultimately his children, refuse to speak to him again because of this dishonour.

I read the poem to a group of 4 students I’d never met. The last lines go: “And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered/ which had been the better way to die.”

The boy next to me said, “Wow. That was really—wow. You know?”

Rejuvenation

It’s just nice to share that reaction sometimes.

Although I always have some kind of deadlines and a long to-do list, the half-term week off from my day job at school is lovely because I can do it all with a bit less rush. I can pretend that writing is my main work.

Sometimes, a lack of spare time can make us more productive. We are aware of our limits so we optimise any opportunity to write. A sudden extra helping of free time, as at half-term, might make us more reckless and we squander some of that time. There’s truth in that.

On the other hand, not being rushed can give us some creative freedom. I might enjoy writing more when I don’t have a million other chores hanging over my head, just as those poor kids on half-term can go out and enjoy themselves.

And maybe, when we all return to school tomorrow, those of us who sought and were privileged to find inspiration will have some new energy and tolerance so we can keep trying to pass it on. When I climbed Brandon Hill in Bristol, the views from the tower were pretty great, but so too were the crocuses close to the ground. It reminded me there’s excitement and beauty to be found all over—maybe we just need a little break.

What makes you say “Wow?”

Seven Wanders of 2025

Last year turned into a year somewhat on the go. Toward the end, I was traveling every 2-3 weeks. Even during term time! Paris, London, America, and then right back to supporting students on Monday morning. When it felt tiring, I pretended I was travelling for Successful Writer purposes, although it actually kind of slowed down my writing.

Where were your favourite adventures in the last year? If you weren’t able to go out and about much, what other sources of inspiration or invigoration did you find?

Bath, United Kingdom

In February, I took a day trip on the train down to Bath. I didn’t go into the ancient Roman sites this time, but walked to Victoria Park and worshiped the crocuses, walked along the busy weir, and of course visited Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, an absolute gem of an independent bookstore.

White River Junction, Vermont

During my October trip to see my family, I walked in the dark early mornings across one bridge and down another. The White River meets the Connecticut here, swirling into the border with New Hampshire, and train tracks pass, lined with colourful trees. The main streets of town have those square, flat buildings that remind me of Western movie sets, but lots of boutique shops inside, plus a Turkish cafe and a Cambodian sandwich shop. Most of all, this town is where my Grammy and Grandpa raised my dad and his older siblings, and where my siblings and I used to visit them, and I’d bring my own little Bear when they were young.

Ozleworth, Gloucestershire

We love this rural hamlet best in the cold clarity. It seems to pour icy blue sky into the saucer of the loping green fields. Smoke rises from cottage chimneys and you can see your breath inside the 12th century Church of St. Nicholas, which has a striking octagonal tower.

Paris

Although our reason for visiting Paris was bittersweet, we made the most of exploring the city. We scattered my aunt’s ashes in the Seine behind Notre Dame and wandered the alleys of the Marais. The next day, we walked down toward the Eiffel Tower, cutting through leafy squares between pretty vintage buildings with mansard windows and Invader street art mosaics.

London

Proof a city can be festive without snow. I went on a Christmas-hunting expedition at the end of November, hiking 13 miles around the capital in 8.5 hours. From Harrods to Kings Cross and St. Pancras train stations, to the Charles Dickens Museum and then the stunning shopfronts of New Bond Street, all fueled by gourmet hot chocolate to go from El & N, you could definitely say ChristMUSS was all around.

Mount Washington, New Hampshire

This feels like a bit of a cheat since much of this “wander” was driven. The old Auto Road zigs and zags slowly up to the 6,288-foot summit, the highest in Northeastern North America. The well-paved road feels narrow and is often without any railing or fence, so the views as you ascend beyond the other White Mountains are spectacular but a bit scary. There is scope for wandering at the top, scrambling over rocks and watching the Cog Railway arrive and depart.

Athens

I did get around a bit, didn’t I? Most years, I’m not visiting four different countries. This was my first visit to Greece, and it was so exciting to walk down a busy, somewhat dingy street and see the Acropolis in the distance. I loved the views from Monastiraki Square, thronged with crowds. A band played and restaurants grilled meat outside. Across the Square were the beautifully weathered pillars of Hadrian’s Library, and beyond that the ruins of the Roman market, surrounded by gorgeous houses with bougainvillea climbing the gates.

2025 Reading Round-Up

With minimal ado, here are my favourite books out of all I read this year. These are truly the 10 best of my best, because there were a few more which I rated with the full 5 stars.

What were your favourite reads this year? Have you read any of these books yet? I know I’m a bit late to the party on some, and I’d love to hear what you thought if you read some of these before.

The Women by Kristin Hannah

An epic tale of an Army nurse in the Vietnam War. She also has to cope with re-entering civilian life, particularly challenging with her upper-class family. They serve as a contrast to the strong, unconditional friendships she formed with other Army nurses. Truly an eye-opening read.

“Time and friendship had done exactly as promised: pain and grief had grown soft and malleable in her hands, almost pliable.”

The Lives of the Dead by Fiona McKay

I joined a book group specifically reading novellas-in-flash. It’s been exciting to explore, and I found this one particularly powerful. Each very short chapter is a mini-story, alternating between episodes in a new wife/ mum’s suffocating life, and stunningly retold fairy tales.

“It’s the kindness that does her in, that releases her long-held tears, that leaves her to walk back, red-eyed, along the line of women when she’s done; kindness, the essential vitamin missing from her supplements, the one she didn’t know she was lacking.”

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

I love ensemble pieces, where a quirky range of characters are thrown together. In this case, it’s at an apartment viewing which then goes wrong due to a desperate, bungled burglary. It’s funny and warm, the sort of thing to help survive a Scandinavian-level winter.

“Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken.”

Love lay down beside me and we wept by Helen Murray Taylor

I know Helen from the Women Writers Network, so I have been looking forward to her mental health memoir for years. She focuses on when she was sectioned in Glasgow following a breakdown. Helen reveals the contradictions we might hold in our minds at our lowest point and still she invites you in with humour.

“Trying to describe love was like trying to stroke Schrodinger’s cat.”

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

I love Lehane’s books, especially his snappy dialogue. This novel is set in Boston just after WWI and deals with racism, poverty, immigration, labour rights, and even the tragedy of the Boston Molasses flood. It made me appreciate that the USA has come through incredibly tense times before, and we may yet make it.

“Time and again what was renounced as treasonous was merely a man standing before a crowd and demanding he be treated as a man.”

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Short and searingly beautiful, this Booker Prize winner is a wondrous read. It takes us through one day in the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station, describing the many juxtapositions of what they see below on their various orbiting paths, and lyrically weaves in the astronauts’ backgrounds and aspirations.

“He has an idea that if you could get far enough away from the earth you’d be able to understand it—to see it with your own eyes as an object, a small blue dot, a cosmic and mysterious thing. Not to understand its mystery, but to understand it is mysterious. To see it as a mathematical swarm. To see the solidity fall away from it.”

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

A great book about totalitarianism and war, with breathtaking depth of character. Both protagonists were so incredibly rich in background and passion for their interests, Marie-Laure with her Verne books and her understanding of how to get around without her sight, Werner and his machines and radios.

“She feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides…She hears the bones of dead whales stir the leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun.”

Home Bird by Fran Hill

*A reading verandah! Found on a* *walk in small town New Hampshire.*

If you’ve read Fran’s Substack–and you really should–you’ll know she excels at writing humour. But I love her detail selection even more. Her plots advance quickly through the specifics her narrator includes, bringing out the nuances of relationships and recreating the period of her novels.

“She knocked on my door, saying, ‘There’s Bakewell tart going spare,’ but I said, ‘It’s not the only one,’ and she left me alone.”

Still Life by Sarah Winman

A true feast of a book, celebrating art and travel and food but most of all friendship, the abiding kind that’s more like true love. After World War II, an unlikely band of Londoners, united only by happening to drink at the same pub, move to Florence and discover worlds both old and new.

“‘We’re embarking on a world of new language and new systems. A world of stares and misunderstandings and humiliations and we’ll feel every single one of them, boy. But we mustn’t let our inability to know what’s what diminish us. Because it’ll try. We have to remain curious and open.’”

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This book is about the creative process, relationships, grief, negotiating differences in ethnicity and sexuality… oh, and videogames. I loved it so much. The section about the NPC (non-playable character) is the most gorgeous and heartbreaking that I have ever read.

“Memory, you realised long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?”

Halfway to Ninety

This Week’s Bit of String: Making it to Europe

When Operation Desert Storm began in early 1991, my aunt, a nurse, renewed her passport. If necessary, she’d be sent to military hospitals in Germany to assist wounded soldiers.

I was ten years old, and jealous. Forget the desert, the storm, the war. Germany made me think of Alps and castles and history. I wanted in on the adventure.

I remember moaning at the kitchen table, “I’ll be an old maid by the time I ever reach Europe!”

In fact, I’ve lived almost half my life on this side of the Atlantic. I first visited the continent when I was 19, and I may have felt terminally single when I arrived, prematurely an old maid, but I returned to the USA [unwittingly] pregnant. Eventually, marriage anchored me here in the UK.

Life can certainly twist. I decorated for Christmas last week, hanging the stocking my mother embroidered for me, and the one she made for my husband. My Baby’s First Christmas 1980 ornaments from when I was 11 days old are on our Argos-ordered tree, and I bet my mom didn’t imagine they would travel this far.

I turn 45 this weekend, and while it would be nice to have a few more publications to my name, I’m quite content. I’ve had the wonderful excitement of being a parent, plus occasional travel, and my job certainly isn’t dull.

I like the sound of 45. It makes me think of a speed limit that’s high for a town centre or residential street, but just about too cautious for the highway. That suits me. I’ll be celebrating with an Italian meal in a Cotswold town, and maybe carol-singing at the local pub after. If it’s not pouring rain, I’ll have a long hike to a nearby town and write there for a couple hours the day before.

Paragraphs After Paragraphs

At work the other day, the bottom set Year 10s were working on narrative and descriptive writing. It’s for the 40-mark Language GCSE question, so the teacher insisted they write at least 5 paragraphs. That sounds impossible to them.

The scruffy little rugby player banished to the back corner learned that I write stories. He asked, “Were they long, what you wrote?”

Over the whole of my life I’ve probably written at least 5000 pages of story drafts by now. Counting my daily scribbles, it might be 10,000 (admittedly not all A4 sized).

We had this conversation as I encouraged young Mr. Rugby based on what he’d already written. He’d done three short paragraphs, and I’d never seen him so focused. It was hard work for him, but something must have gelled. In Maths and Science, he’s so distracted by other students’ antics that he barely does any work at all.

I’d been urging him to view concentration as a muscle that needs building. “It’s like how you do drills with your rugby team, right? Let’s see if you can go thirty seconds without looking away from your work. Then a minute.”

I’m not sure this has caught on yet. But every now and then, it’s worth testing my own focus “muscles” as well. I spend the majority of my time trying to cross multiple items off a to-do list at once. With the weather worsening and the holidays approaching, it’s extra busy in some ways but it also feels like an ideal time to slow down.

Adjusting Speed

I always re-watch the extended version of Lord of the Rings as the nights draw in. I can’t imagine watching the more concise version; I want to be immersed in the epic worldbuilding and character development. But I also have the decorations to put up, shopping to do, treats to bake, on top of the usual commitments, so for example last year, I was hanging ornaments on the tree while Return of the King was on, and I had to pause with angels dangling from my fingers to make sure I took in the wondrous lighting of the beacons.

*A cosy corner near the couch where I mostly do my writing* *(and reading)*

This year, somehow I managed to be still for long portions of the films. I wasn’t even scribbling or answering messages on my phone or using the Mahjongg app. I’d lit candles, my own mini-beacons, and I just curled up to watch the story unfold.

It felt luxurious. I did the same, briefly, when I put Frozen on the following weekend. What a treat to train undivided attention on the opening scenes: the view through the ice, the sunrise and aurora colours. I miss the wintry terrain of home sometimes, and I marvel at how this Disney animation captured the slightly porous, ridged contour of the ice chunks.

I’m also treating myself to sink into a reread of Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea, which I read just a year ago. But I craved the sumptuous layers of stories and magic, and wanted to see what I can pick up from a second read.

I still have big plans of course, for Christmas and for the next year. Hikes and excursions… In 2026 we’ll be taking a little trip to France for a Jazz Festival, and I’ll visit my family. Even when I feel a bit worn out, there’s some part of me aching to keep exploring, to keep making the most of each day. I’m just reminding that intrepid young part of me that slowing down and enjoying a moment is pretty worthwhile, too.

How might you take things a bit slowly over the holiday?

Writing Showcase

This week Lou Wilford, a fellow writer I know through reviewing and critiquing groups, has featured me on her blog as November’s Showcased Writer. Lou writes with wit and humour, so her own monthly blog posts are terrifically entertaining.

*Dickens Museum, Doughty Street, London*

Follow this link for my interview and a couple of stories. I enjoyed reflecting on Lou’s questions. We cover my influences and processes as a writer; what it means to be “cultured,” and the unfortunately valid question: “Are writers selfish?”

I selected my story “Centuries, in Burnt Sienna” as a sample to include in the showcase. I wrote it in 2020 and it was published in 2021, but I find myself going back to it when the world seems particularly tumultuous. Two sisters come of age in the 1980s and 1990s, and while they experience the terrorist attacks of September 2001 very differently, it ends their rivalry and brings them closer than ever before.

It’s a total classic, rich in taste and colour imagery. Also featuring pioneer Barbies at risk of dysentery, and a puppy named Periwinkle.

So anyway, that’s all I’m publishing for this fortnight. It’s handy timing. I worked hard on the interview questions and such during my flights at the end of October, and the work pays off a month later as I’m busy making Thanksgiving pies. I’m also fresh off a madcap romp through London, walking 13 miles in 8.5 hours to take in as many festive sights as possible. I expect I’ll be writing about that a bit in my Seven Wanders of 2025 coming up in another month!

Happy beginning of the holidays, everyone. Do let me know what you think of the interview. What makes a person cultured? And should we allow creative types a bit of selfishness?

All Over the Place

This Week’s Bit of String: Expanding brackets

Back in school for the Christmas term, I spent 40 minutes working with a student on algebraic practice expanding brackets. Guiding him to multiply each bracketed term by each term in the other brackets, explaining why we’re multiplying here.

He was making progress, starting to remember a couple more steps as we moved on to the third problem of his online homework—and then he was sick of it. He insisted on guessing, repeatedly and incorrectly, stabbing the keyboard, for the fourth problem.

I sputtered reminders that he could work out the right answer if he tried.

*Autumn leaves at Mascoma Lake, New Hampshire*

He stabbed another wrong guess. “Miss, I just saw, like, three stages of grief pass over your face in one second.”

He may well have seen anger and bargaining and depression, but his comment then immediately made me laugh. It’s fitting, I suppose. It’s been a very busy couple of weeks.

Across the Ocean and Back

Just a week ago, as the half-term break ended, I arrived back from the USA. I published my previous blog post from Heathrow Departures on my way out, and spent the entire flight westward on writing tasks. Caught up on the latest Mslexia issue, scribbled about the journey, and wrote answers to interview questions for a Writers Showcase I’ll be participating in at the end of the month.

I made the trip for three reasons: to be with my family as we cope with bereavement, to start finding some private closure for myself, and to help out in any way possible. My parents are now in charge of my aunt’s house as well as their own, and my autistic cousin is now a wonderful part of our family. There’s a lot going on.

For example, on my first full day there I woke up at 4:15 a.m. and started scribbling about the previous evening’s reunion with my family. At the vaguest sign of daylight, around 6:45, I embarked on a 5-mile hike. I started in awe of the New England autumn colours which I haven’t seen much in 22 years and eventually made my way to the cemetery where I had a good cry at 8 a.m. over the family graves. I thanked our lost loves for giving us such good examples of how to look after each other.

After helping my mom with weeding, organising the pantry, and then hoovering up cobwebs from the basement ceiling, we left my aunt’s house for my parents’ and met up with my brother and his kids, plus my kiddo and their fiancé, for raucous family times. This included, among other random moments, me bouncing my niece on my lap while singing a sped-up version of a Sunday school song about Daniel in the lion’s den, in honour of my cousin’s middle name Daniel. Junie demanded it twice more.

And that was just one day! It was a wonderful week, I managed to squeeze a fair bit in, although it feels surreally separate from my back-to-term life. Despite the lack of sleep on the overnight flight home plus hints of jet lag, I made it through this past week at school while also cleaning my own house this time, running the BlueSky channel for Women Writers Network, critiquing 3 different pieces for other writers, editing the opening section of my new novel to submit that for feedback, starting my Thanksgiving cooking, and writing this masterful piece.

Ups and Downs

My day job itself is a microcosmic whirlwind of emotion. I’ll spend an excruciating hour with a student who refuses to go to classes so it’s down to TAs to educate her 1:1. An hour despairing of my career choice while she refuses to do anything while she glowers at her phone under a fur-lines parka hood. Try to make conversation and half the time I’m met with a sneering, “You WHAT?” The next hour, I might be fortunate enough to attend a Photography class, prompting and scribing a student’s self-evaluation of his work while a couple other boys in the class exchange corny jokes.

“Miss, what do you think of this one: What did the first hat say to the second hat? —You stay here, I’ll go on a head.”

I told my husband’s favourite joke which involves an elephant impersonation so I could never do it justice here. This surprised the boys so much, they cracked up. Meanwhile, my student tried his best to bite his smile back and I could claim my revenge:

“Pretty sure I just saw all five stages of grief pass over your face when I told that joke,” I quipped.

While acknowledging, and celebrating really, that our lives are made up of such emotional tempests, and that progress is often two steps forward and one (or two or three) back, I don’t necessarily like that portrayed too realistically in a book. I like a story to have a fairly orderly trajectory.

Yes, the protagonist, having been made suddenly aware of a problem during the inciting incident, will over-compensate and mess it all up. Yes, all will seem lost at the midpoint and they’ll have to rally again. But it irks me when a writer reconciles characters just to fall out over something else, for example, or gives them a crucial self-realisation only to forget it in the next chapter and have to learn it again. This seems common in stories of middle-class angst.

Maybe my intolerance makes me a selfish reader, but I don’t need fiction to resemble real life that much. I can read about real, sometimes harrowing issues, but give me some kind of actual trajectory through it. The ups and downs of real life are tiring enough.

Does that bother you in a book? How firmly do you like stories plotted, or are you happy enough to spend each moment with a character?

Weighing Ideas

This Week’s Bit of String: Notre Dame towers and a dog called Unity

Last weekend, we were in Paris. It was a wild idea, the trip planned in less than a fortnight. From 3:00 Saturday morning, when we woke up to shower and catch a flight from Bristol to Paris CDG, until 10:15 Sunday night when we fell into bed back in our own home, we walked 54,000 steps. We stayed Saturday night in a tiny hotel room in the 14th Arondissement, but the bed was comfortable, we had climate control, and there was a full Parisian breakfast included.

We had a bittersweet reason for this enjoyable adventure. When my aunt Laurel died a couple weeks ago, one of my cousins already had a trip booked to Paris. Laurel and my cousin were great Francophiles, so the family was inspired to send some of her ashes over and scatter them in the Seine. I couldn’t be at the full funeral in Vermont–busy though the weekend in Paris was, it didn’t shatter me the way a whirlwind cross-Atlantic trip with a minimum of 16 hours travel each way would have done–I could be part of this goodbye without missing work.

My cousin chose a spot across from Notre Dame’s dome, where we could walk down a cobbled ramp to the river. We found as we approached that as well as a cathedral view, we would be leaving my aunt alongside a weathered wooden statue of a turtle bracketed onto the stone wall, quite fitting as she’d had a beloved pet turtle for decades.

She loved dogs too, and soon after we’d poured her ashes into the river, a dog came bounding in, bucking jubilantly, snapping at her own splashes. Her French owner told us the dog’s name was Unity, and we did feel a strange synthesis at the resting place.

I was happy with this sendoff for Laurel, but my heart aches that all the life erupting around her in this location will never know her or her story. I wonder what other remnants of lives we step over all the time, and what unimaginable events will unfold later.

Interlocking Stories

Paris is particularly suited to such wonderings, with its many plaques honouring students and others who were killed in the Resistance against Nazi occupiers, and other signs memorialising Jewish families that were deported. Behind Notre Dame, there’s the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation, which I researched for part of a story I wrote in January. The main character spent time in Paris and met his fiance, changing his life.

I certainly didn’t imagine I’d be visiting Paris later, and scattering my aunt’s ashes across the Seine from the same Memorial. Once again, there’s a strange unity of past and present, fiction and nonfiction. As Julia Ormond says in the 1990s remake of Sabrina, one of my aunt’s “Chicken Soup Movies” which she believed had restorative powers: “Paris is always a good idea.”

*Back to the writing work, here’s a picture of the incredible Our Lady of the Workers church in the 14th Arondissement*

I’d actually forgotten about the story I wrote in January, with its Paris turning point, until my cousin told me where we’d take our aunt’s ashes. The story needs a lot of work. I wrote it during my January short story binge, when I slapped whatever idea I had onto paper: new ones, old and previously rejected ones, half-dreamed ones.

Since then, I’ve had a couple short stories I’ve worked hard at polishing, and I’ve started a new novel while still working on the final edits to my book about Eve and Creation. These projects are still keeping me pretty busy alongside my day job and everything else, so the fictional Paris encounter will probably wait a long while.

Ideas to Remember

It’s not possible to remember every idea or story, good or bad. So just because one thing has to wait doesn’t mean it will never get its time. When it comes to assessing our creative choices–and our life choices, really–there are so many possibilities that it seems unfair to judge one as entirely bad or good.

While I’m making up a new novel, I haven’t decided yet whose voice to lead with out of my new characters, and I keep switching. Would 5 points-of-view be too many? Yes, I know. But I decided while making myself write just four days after Laurel’s death, my work-in-progress wasn’t fun enough. So I pried its bars loose, and went back to page 2 to introduce an entirely new character, outside the pages of development I’d explored and planned in the pre-drafting stages.

Have you ever felt the need to do such a thing? Did it work?

My middle-class protagonists who take themselves somewhat seriously needed a foil, or maybe that was just me. Either way, I’ll see what comes of having someone else in the mix. A story undergoes so much evolution and so many rewrites, most ideas turn out to contribute something worthwhile.

I wouldn’t usually slide in an extra character, but it’s earlyish still, and who’s to stop me? In real life, there are people who appear out of nowhere and brighten everything.

I wouldn’t usually spend a middle-of-the-term weekend gallivanting around Paris, either. I don’t know if Paris, is, in fact, always a good idea, but it worked for us this time. And there’s a lot more we’d like to see. Strange to think I now have a bit of my aunt on this side of the ocean, over the Channel. Wondrous to imagine the places and people we have yet to be part of.

Taking a Moment

This Week’s Bit of String: Fairies of all sorts

Last week my entire family stayed together in a lakeside house in Maine. This included my 5-year-old niece, who moved expertly from one of us to the next, with wide-eyed invitations for our attention and imaginative assignations for us.

“Want to pretend you’re my mommy and I’m a toddler?” she asked me one morning. I was hardly about to turn that down.

*Our view as Lily Pad and the Moment Fairy*

Later on, she had my brother-in-law at her command in the role of big brother, while her own big brother (actual age 6) was her little brother. She’d gone from being a toddler to being 13 and a half, and her name was Lily Pad. My kiddo’s fiancee was now her mommy, and I was briefly a co-worker. My niece’s job was testing beds, which after various hikes and kayak-paddles and swims, I was more than willing to help with.

In the evening, we all gathered in lawn chairs to watch the sun set over the lake. Then my niece invited me to sit on the dock with her, dangling our feet in “Waterworld.”

She told me, “Sometimes if I need a moment, and I tell my mom I want to go to Waterworld, then I come here and you’re the fairy who meets me. You’re the fairy for people who need to take a moment, so they can talk to you and not be lonely, and you won’t tell anyone.”

I couldn’t have been prouder than when she led me back to the rest of our family, now doggedly roasting marshmallows around a campfire despite the 30 C/ 90 F heat, and she introduced me as The Moment Fairy.

Ongoing Stories

When I was in second grade, our teacher read us the 1953 chapter book Little Witch by Anna Elizabeth Bennett, about a witch’s daughter who would prefer to be a fairy. This book had me convinced I, too, was a secret fairy, and I eagerly assigned the role of captor witch to whichever family member incurred my unspoken wrath.

*Fairy house at my hometown’s lakeside park*

It might be my mother for making me drink my orange juice even though I said it tasted sour, or my little brother for faking naps and then being allowed to stay up later than me. If you think these reasons are far-fetched, wait till you hear my solution.

I was certain that if I woke up at the right time, and went into my closet with the correct numbers on my little calculator, then the fairies would rescue me. I tried it once and it didn’t work, but I figured I needed a different moment of the night.

Nothing really dissuaded me from that story. It dissolved into new fantasies I nursed in my imagination. Similarly, in my niece’s game, she was constantly accommodating new roles for us. While most were outside making s’mores, she led my husband by the hand through the holiday house.

“He’s the Show-You-Something Fairy,” she explained when I went in for extra ingredients.

Sure enough, she was picking up various objects and explaining them to her engineer uncle as if he’d just materialised from a fantastical dimension (it probably seems as if we do, appearing once a year from the UK). The Something she was Showing him as I went back outside was a flyswatter.

Moments to Remember

I was inspired by my niece’s imaginative efforts, and moved by her confidence that at any given time, at least one of us would want to duck into her world. As she gets older, she will desperately need a variety of people she can slip away and have a moment with. She’ll have so many things to show and explain to us.

Sometimes, as I wrote a couple weeks ago, I worry about my stories getting stuck in my head and progressing no further. But while I value being a writer and long for success, my roles as mother, wife, daughter, sister, aunt are more important. It’s nice to remember that I serve some purpose there, and it’s truly a privilege to do so.

For now, the fairies have flown. Back in the UK, I’m the Moment Fairy for myself. I have to keep going, finding ways to be present from afar for my family while remaining present in the life I sought elsewhere. It means choosing which of the dozens of times I think of them each day are the most valuable to pass on. That’s the challenge, when we’re not rubbing up against each other regularly and experiencing life together.

Sometimes, separation hurts too much. Maybe it’s a pleasant evening with no extra family to share it with, when I have no one to bake for but my husband and me, when it’s warm but there’s no place to swim. I miss the feel of a little hand in mine so much. It’s tempting to dig myself into chores or into writing assignments, but maybe I should surrender to those moments, too, to keep my caring fully kindled.

Which moments matter most to you? How do you make the best of them?

Objects in the Rearview Mirror

This Week’s Bit of String: A library visit and hometown changes

On the first day of my summer visit from old England to New, I went to the library with my mother. It’s recently been refurbished in my hometown. The children’s area boasts a full play kitchen, and a teen reading room features a whiteboard table for doodling. On top of the bookshelves in the grown-up section, a community craft exhibit includes three-dimensional scrapbooked cards, patchwork quilts, carvings of birds, embroidered landscapes, and a whole felted ark full of animals.

What a lovely place. I did wonder, though, as Mom and I left, “What happened to that mysterious cabinet of dolls that used to be at the back of the library when I was a kid?”

She responded, “I keep wondering what happened to the collection of international creches at the Catholic shrine after it was bought out.”

Another good question. The lakeside Catholic retreat in town ran out of funds and was bought out by the Shaker Museum across the street, an ironic reversal of fortunes which I may revisit in a later post because there’s an intriguing story at the heart of it.

For our purposes this week, suffice to say that the Catholic site had a Christmas specialty. They ranged an immense collection of lights along their hillside. Coming home on a December night, we’d see them reflected in the lake from a couple miles away. They also took donations of nativity sets from all around the world, many of them beautifully crafted.

It’s funny how objects that may not have tangibly impacted us can anchor in our minds and resurface later. As writers, we’re often character-driven and particularly fascinated with people. But lately, I’ve noticed inanimate objects asserting importance in my short stories. What does it mean?

Living in a Material World

For me, writing a short story has generally included a central image, which may well be a natural or material object. Mudpies, a book of mazes, lipstick. Usually these are sort of thematic, whereas lately they’re practically plot points.

In the past year, I wrote a story about a fairground tragedy involving a ferris wheel, and the wheel additionally functions as a wider symbol. Another story currently on submission is about a family, each child represented by a colour from the gumballs in a vintage candy machine. Two decades of mid-twentieth century history are magnified through the machine’s glass sphere.

In real life, I’ve tended to wax sentimental over objects. After moving house when I was 8, I carried a little box of favourite things with me everywhere. A stone from the lake where we used to live, a broken necklace charm from a long-distance relative, I can’t even remember what else. When called upon to correct a sentence on the blackboard, I didn’t leave my seat without my box. I dropped it once and scrambled on the floor in front of my new classmates to gather my treasured crumbs.

Objects stand in for people in my mind. One of the many details I plan regarding my summer trip is coordinating my contact lenses. I wear monthly ones, and I always time the changing of them so that I put new ones in on the last day with my family. That way, I can linger for longer back in the UK with lenses that have “seen” my loved ones. It’s silly, but I’ve not been able to shake that symbolism.

Object Permanence

*Please look after this bear thank you.*

Maybe I am holding back a bit from attaching deeply to characters in a short story, placing a central object between us for distance. Will that impede the reader’s experience? We’ll have to see. It’s a new angle from which to look at characters—how they handle objects in their lives can tell us a lot.

It’s not as if this is wholly without literary precedent. Objects are important in children’s literature. A glass slipper, a golden ticket…A wardrobe becomes a new world, a boxcar becomes a home, dolls come to life. I remember a book in our church library about a penny. Each chapter focused on a new owner of that penny, from a child abducted by native Americans to an enslaved boy running toward freedom.

What could objects say about us, if they could speak? We did an assignment like that in our Journal As Literature college class. A friend wrote from the point of view of the socks she always wore to bed. I wrote about the teddy bear I’d bought my baby from London, to connect them to their then-estranged father. If I’m remembering correctly, I think the bear assessed me as guilty of some misplaced sentimentality, but he felt compassion for me too. Of course he was compassionate; he’s a teddy bear.

What would you write about? If your main character had to flee with a handful of possessions, what would they take?

Strange Journeys

This Week’s Bit of String: A pink overnight bus to Russia

When I was nineteen, I had a couple weeks after summer work and before my term abroad in the UK. Somewhat to my mother’s chagrin, I opted to visit Russia during that time while traveling among friends. From visiting Taru in Helsinki, I would go to Yulia in Moscow, then Zuzana in Bratislava.

After obtaining my “entry clearance” at Finland’s intimidating Russian Embassy, which reduced me to tears and impoverished me by $300 while charging the German guy in front of me only $60, I remained determined to visit Russia. I expected further bumps in the road.

*Some building I passed in my St. Petersburg daze. Almost the same pink as the bus.*

I did not expect the rickety overnight bus carrying me across the Finnish-Russian border to be pink. I boarded with dozens of sombre Russian passengers, and secured a window seat. The old woman next to me rested her head on my shoulder and went to sleep.

Throughout the night I peered into the darkness, passing vast swathes of evergreen trees and seemingly abandoned, massive industrial or nuclear plants. We disembarked to have our passports stamped out of Finland, then disembarked again for the Russian entry stamp.

“First time in Russia?” asked the Finnish border guard. At my assent, he slammed down his stamp. “Good luck.”

In a way, I did have good luck. But not in a conventional sense.

After the sleepless night with a stranger leaning on me, I left the bus as soon as it stopped. The sun was just rising, a distant golden glow that could equally have been a smouldering chemical inferno. Only one other person left the bus with me, a guy in his twenties.

As I watched the bus drive away, glad to be rid of it, I heard him say in accented English, “You know we are still outside St. Petersburg?”

I shrugged. “That’s fine.”

“Didn’t you have more luggage?”

I had my day bag over my shoulder, but he was right. My even-more stuffed rucksack, with three months’ worth of belongings, was still in the hold under the bus.

Getting in Trouble

I suppose it’s a classic tale: I caused my own problems. I was frustrated with myself for making such a stupid mistake, in so significant a matter, so early on.

The man on the street with me rolled his eyes as if equally annoyed at my folly. “Look,” he said, “Come home with me while I get ready for work. I’ll help you find your way into the city and perhaps locate your bag.”

Now, this will sound like more stupid decision-making. I was aware I shouldn’t go to an unknown man’s house in a foreign, semi-hostile nation. But if he had truly bad intent, I reasoned, then he would pretend to be more welcoming instead of exasperated. So I followed him.

I experienced my first Russian apartment. Toilet and shower in separated tiny chambers, a mug of bitter black tea. Dmitri, who’d been visiting his fiancee in Finland over the weekend and had returned just in time for work, gave me a St. Petersburg map with Finnish location names, wrote down the bus company’s phone number and address, and saw me off on the correct metro train.

I spent a few hours wandering the city. I only remember fragments, almost 25 years later. Deciphering a couple more Russian letters by noticing a cinema poster for the recent film, The Patriot. Glimpsing the Hermitage, the Tsar’s Summer Palace, from across a busy street, my view criss-crossed by tramlines. Ascertaining directions from an ice cream seller because we could both speak intermediate French. I was miraculously reunited with my rucksack at the coach company’s office, where no one had been the least bit interested in its contents.

Travel Stories

I’ve been thinking about this somewhat misadventurous episode since I’ve just finished a truly inspiring novel with a lot of travel in it: Sarah Winman’s Still Life.

This book has me longing to visit Florence, Italy, wander and look at art and eat amazing food. It’s also been a luxurious read because while the plot has war and flood mixed in, mostly it’s about people being super nice to each other. I might not be making it sound very exciting. But the characters’ love for each other, their tolerance for, even appreciation of, each other’s quirks is a balm as the real world seems to become more bitter and stressful.

In my travels as a student (who probably comes across as naive here), I gained independence but also learned it’s not the end of the world when that independence goes wrong. I don’t often put my travels into story form, although a couple times I’ve been inspired by places I’ve visited.

However, I notice in recounting this that travel puts us in a unique position to understand and utilise story structure. We embark on a journey with certain expectations, but what we want may differ from what we need. Being outside our familiar borders forces us to reflect on who we really are, as we notice we are stuck with ourselves here, there, and everywhere. And even when we bring problems upon ourselves, it can turn out okay.

Amazingly, once I reached Moscow the next day, I had a good time. My Russian friend was passionate about showing me around, and her stories about local history and how the city ran fascinated me. There’s another little twist in the tale for you.

Have you encountered surprising kindnesses while away? How does travel fuel your self-reflection and creativity?