“On the North Carolina coast in late September, M and I went to an old-time jam in a friend’s backyard. The southern humidity had started to lift, and the air felt clean. Standing near the fence, we watched a couple swing dancing. They saw us watching and offered a lesson.”

"New York City banned smoking indoors in 2003, the same year I became a chain-smoking, black-coffee-chugging high school dropout. I took this inconvenient timing as proof that I’d been born in the wrong era, nostalgic for smoky cafés filled with writers and artists surviving on grit and vision in a pre- gentrified city—nostalgic for a time before I was even born.”

I buy this CD from the Kmart on Santa Maria Way with a friend the summer before 6th grade. We walk to the store via a shortcut behind the thoroughfare without her parents as chaperones. My family lives across town, so we return to her house for the first listen. Summers are like this: my mother shuffles me to a friend’s house, and I start to equate car rides and leaving home with something fun. We didn’t always live out here—in the bad part of town, in a dirty house on a big lot full of rats. Everything about this house is red: terracotta tiles and maroon carpet and my parents fighting and stacked bills with bold font and a burgundy-painted deck in the backyard dealing out splinters.

By the time I reach Serifos, my sister has transferred to dementia care. "I shouldn't be here," I tell my classmates. 

We're on a pebble of an island in the Cyclades archipelago, some 75 square km of rock heaved from the Aegean Sea. Commercial airlines don't land here. Large cruise lines don't anchor here. Summer visitors stay on precipices near the cave where, according to ancient legends, Odysseus killed a cyclops. Dramatic, remote, and imbued with history and myth, Serifos is an idyllic setting for our three-week literary retreat. But as we step from our ferry, I hold tightly to my cell phone. Dread follows me up the nearly perpendicular hill to our studio apartments.

“On a bright, icy afternoon in early January 1999, I walked down the cement steps from my middle school towards my mother’s burgundy Ford Taurus, tossed my backpack into the backseat, and took my place in the front, moving a juice box and a bag of popcorn from the seat into my lap. The deep blue sky filtered through the great trees that lined the soccer field; stray leaves spiraled downward from the branches intertwining cathedral-like above. I was thirteen years old.”

“Sunflower played, and the boys sang along. They stood with their arms crossed, chests puffed, faces blank, lips purple. They used to count tides to know when their parents would be home. Now it was too unpredictable. They looked so young, shivering on the water's edge, forcing their voices lower, boys trying to be men.”

“Like the blues, samba is resistance music—the kind that seizes you by the throat and won’t let go—especially with its strong connection to Carnaval, the yearly festival that celebrates and reclaims Afro-Brazilian culture and its emphasis on percussion.”

“Salih allows me to leave the Sudan of orientalist fantasy, depressing news cycles, and white terror for a gentler, more complex place. Salih provides the ease that I cannot find myself, so that I can enter Sudan more placidly in my own season of migration to this north.”

“I couldn’t help but feel as strange to them as an alien arrived on their snowy, Scandinavian planet: hungry, anxious, in search of connections. Now, like me, the two of them were also looking up with expectation.”

“Crouched in the attic, I read To Kill A Mockingbird, transported 4,200 miles from Scotland to Alabama.”

“I thought I was reading to take me back, in geography and in my own life. A way to revisit the teeming humanity on the train platform. The cardamom boiling in the milk for tea. The bitter smoke of morning air. A way to turn from the last page back to the first.”

“Doozy Miller’s margin notes held curious revelations, which only underscored how James unabashedly layers anti-American sentiment with chauvinism.”

“I wanted to climb toward the hugeness of the world and to cobble love together. I wanted to know exile, like Gilbert.”

“I was sure there were missing pages or I was misremembering the story of Dracula. I soon realized, though, that I wasn’t looking for an exquisitely crafted translation or even a new understanding of Dracula. Rather, I was reveling in the fact that one of my favorite stories had made its way to my favorite place in the world.”

“In Paris, all I saw were the seams, threadbare. A ghost’s shadows whipping around my ankles in every arrondissement.”

“The town of Haworth looks more or less like it has for the past several hundred years, which is to say, like a fairy tale town.”