There are so many reasons we say "no" to things. Fear, finances, time constraints, and the list goes on. In my own life, I had been saying no to too many things for too long. Yet my trying to be "practical," "disciplined," and "realistic," was not having the desired effect. Instead of feeling proud of myself and more secure, I felt itchy, anxious, hungry for the pleasure and the expansion that always comes from new experiences and challenges.
SO: being a firm believer that nothing feeds the body/mind/spirit like travel, and that all writers benefit from writers workshops, I applied to something alternately called The Left Bank Writers Conference and The Left Bank Writers Workshop. At a workshop or conference, I get so much out of being amongst my tribe, of immersing myself in words and communing with fellow authors for a full week. And this conference would also satisfy the yearning for France (I had not been back in 8 years.) Through amazing feats of budgeting contortionism, I soon found myself on a plane in San Francisco on June 14th bound for Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris. I would be staying above the best ice cream parlor in Paris, Berthillon, on the Île St. Louis, my favorite part of the city.
It was one of those magic weeks where synchronicity and happy circumstance seemed stationed around every corner. What a diverse group of eight we were! From the deep South to Australia, we had an ambassador from every school of writing: theater, poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. And we were all giddy to be a part of it. There is a little bit of "lost" in all artists, and as Gertrude Stein famously quipped "You are all a lost generation." We channeled Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Chagall, making daily pilgrimages to their haunts, their apartments, their studios.
We started each day by writing in the Jardin de Luxembourg. We touched the plaque on the bar at Café des Lilas where Hemingway used to write. (I touched the plaque there also dedicated to Man Ray) There is something very powerful about being in a city with so much history. You walk the same streets that others walked thousands of years ago. The age and beauty of the place is quite moving. And we ate long lunches, like the French, with copious crisp bottle of Rosé and unparalleled people watching. There was even a magnificent Chagall retrospective, "Between War and Peace" that perfectly aligned his art with what was taking place in his life at the time.
I came looking for inspiration and found it. Paris renews my spirit. My next book features Madame Curie as a character and sure enough, a block from my petite apartment, on the banks of the Seine, was the very apartment where she lived for a time. On my last night in Paris, the first night of Summer, the streets alive with people dancing and making music until dawn for the Fête de la Musique, I stood outside her building and looked up, most happy that I had said "yes."
