A Writer’s Journey: Mapping One’s Dreams

Guest blogger, Isabell Serafin

From the window of my home in Northern Italy, I can see the snow-covered Alps. I live in a town not far from Turin, that city of nearly a million Italians that foreigners often bypass for Milan. Milan is sexy. Turin is not. But sexy doesn’t always make for the best writer’s life. A writer does indeed need commotion—at least I do—but in small bits. I need not exist in a cave. What I do need are a good selection of cafes, great bookstores, eclectic museums and conversations with people from whom I just might learn something. So while Milan has fashionistas, ridiculously good clothing and beautiful people, Turin, at least for me, offers something more applicable.

In the mornings I walk down Via Po, a boulevard over which elegant arcades once shielded Turin’s fastidious nobility from the rain. As I walk beneath them, I think about how I made my journey to this verdant Italian city at the foot of the Italian Alps. I think of the writers who have called this Baroque-style city home. Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, I think of Alessandro Barrico. I think of the writers I have read and loved.

Ten years ago, one moody evening in Portland, Oregon, I was reading a biography on James Baldwin, who famously expatriated to France. The book, by William J. Weatherby was called, Artist on Fire. Like Baldwin I wanted to be an artist and perhaps a bit like a young, hungry, pre-fame Baldwin, I was a bit on fire. I wanted to get out of the city I knew as home. I yearned to see the world. I was desperate to write. But I sensed that I needed to be in the right place to do so contentedly. I made a decision that mood-driven evening to uproot. I craved the sojourn. I needed to find my version of Baldwin’s France. I set out on a journey. I wrote in sidewalk cafes in Paris. My journal before me, I sat in Krakow’s medieval-themed restaurants on cold winter afternoons. From sun-lit restaurants in Cape Town, I plotted short stories while the waves of the Indian Ocean crashed below me. I wrote from the backs of taxis in congested Hanoi. One humid summer, I scripted a novel from a sleepy mountain top village in Haiti.

But when I landed in Northern Italy, I understood immediately, I had finally gotten it right.

These days I meander into one of Turin’s arcade boulevard cafes. After my morning cappuccino, I pen stories which inspire me and when I do, I think back to Baldwin. I remember that the best of lives are mapped by following one’s instincts, dreams.

Isabell Serafin holds a Bachelors of Arts degree in English Literature from Vermont College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She has worked as a fashion journalist, a magazine editor and a copywriter. Excerpts of her latest novella have been published in the Istanbul Literary Review, PANK and Ramshackle Review. Isabell lives in Northern Italy.

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