Guest post by Joyce Hinnefeld. Joyce is a a dear friend, a wonderful writer, & the director of last month's inspiring & amamzing Moravian Writers' Conference-- about which I've written on this blog. Take it away, Joyce!
My husband, twelve-year-old daughter, and I took a fabulous trip
last summer, to Greece and Rome. In Greece we spent time in Athens, took day
trips to Arachova and Delphi, then spent time on the island of Naxos and took
more day trips, to Delos and Mykonos.
And let me tell you, I have got some photos! The iPhone makes it
all too easy. But instead of the freshly whitened buildings with blue trim and
Byzantine churches and countless cats, instead of the glorious statues of lions
and gods and goddesses and the fragments of temples to Apollo, I want to show
you this single photo from Greece, which I took outside the archaeological
museum on the island of Delos. It’s of a rusted and clearly long-unused pay
phone. Years of sun and wind and blowing sand have done their work on it. It’s
a different kind of Greek ruin.
Ruth has been my inspiration and guide through the many years of
our friendship in all kinds of ways, but maybe most keenly in her deep
appreciation of travel--particularly the ways in which travel inspires her
writing. Travel inspires my writing too, but I think the form that takes, for
me, is different. Instead of imagining ancient worlds, charms and curses,
mermaids and sultans and captive girls, I find myself--in the midst of all that
beauty and history--looking at the two women (were they sisters? were they as
sad as they seemed to me?) serving us breakfast in the hotel in Rome. The young
man who sold ice cream and snacks on the small ferry boat, pedaling his bike
furiously from the port, carrying a bucket for more ice during our stop on
Mykonos. The beautiful French mother, with her two shy pre-teen daughters, at
the pool on Naxos. Wondering what they had for breakfast, who was causing them
pain or giving them joy, what they remembered fondly, what they wished they’d
never done.
I don’t think my preoccupation with the present-day people around
me when I travel comes from my being stuck in the present; I’m actually a very
nostalgic person. That nostalgia keeps showing up in things I write lately. In
fiction, it emerges in the mother-daughter relationships I keep including, with
mothers remembering their own younger lives, and sort of understanding their
daughters’ lives, but sort of not. That’s me thinking about my own daughter, I
suppose. But I think it’s also me missing my own younger self.
In the piece I’m working on now, a mother and her college-age
daughter take a trip much like the one we took last summer. Only in this case,
they’re going to revisit scenes from a semester, and a follow-up summer, that
the mother spent abroad thirty years before. She wants her daughter to consider
studying in Rome; the daughter says she isn’t really interested in living in a
dorm with other American students and studying that particular form of
imperialism. On the island of Delos, while her mother tries to get her
interested in the row of massive lion statues, glowing in the midday sun, the
daughter snaps photos of a museum card that refers to the Athenians’ “overtly
imperialist policy in the Aegean,” then the rusted pay phone. Later she posts
both online with the caption, “Layers of human history . . . .”
The young man pedaling his bike away from the port will show up
too, as will two middle-aged sisters serving breakfast in the little birreria
next to a hotel called the Hotel Cinecittá in Rome (in reality, it was called
the Hotel Fellini--but there really was a little birreria where we had
breakfast, and it was filled with music stands and posters and books about
Italian neo-realist cinema).
For a long time I haven’t wanted to admit how much the fiction I
write has to do with me. My life, my
preoccupations, my unanswered questions. But of course that’s what I’m doing,
even when I try to imagine my way into the life of a sad and lonely Italian
woman, or two Greek brothers who grew up on a farm on Naxos, or the American
college girl who, one magical summer after a semester abroad in Rome, fell for
the older brother.
But sometimes you need to leave home--to travel, observe, and
take lots of photos--to recognize those preoccupations, those unanswered
questions. And the people who will bring them to life.
Joyce Hinnefeld is the
author of two novels, Stranger Here Below and In
Hovering Flight, and a collection of short stories, Tell Me
Everything and Other Stories. She is the Cohen Chair for English and
Literature at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. Learn more about her work at www.joycehinnefeld.com.
