Dispatches from a Nomadic Literary Life
On a warm July day last year, most of my family piled into a New York City taxi with suitcases and backpacks. The taxi sped toward the Hudson River while the driver talked on his cell phone over music thudding from the radio. We hooked a U-turn, crossing over a bike path before entering the city’s port, and hit a man on a scooter. It didn’t feel like an auspicious beginning to our Family Gap Year.
The Gap Year came about because our lives aligned perfectly in 2024. My son, Aidan, graduated from high school. My daughter, Faith, graduated from university. My husband, Tim, decided to retire, and I can work from anywhere. It’s not often that life provides a clean break for us all at once. We decided to take advantage of it and designed a trip from the Arctic to the Antarctic.
Since Faith didn’t want to depart right away, she opted to join us a month later in Norway. We three remaining chose to cruise to Europe aboard the Norwegian Star. We splurged for a balcony room, and, since I was anxious about maintaining a writing schedule, I was happy to see that there was a small seat and shelf that could double as a writing desk.
A little before sunset, we glided out of New York Harbor with a killer view of Manhattan, music blasting across the upper decks.
The Manhattan skyline | photo: eoconnors
In the evening, we headed to the cafeteria for dinner. As the center of unlimited coffee and snacks, I had imagined the cafeteria would be my main writing area. The Star is a small ship, however. Despite the wait staff circulating, there never seemed to be enough tables to meet the demand of hungry passengers. As a result, guests were not encouraged to linger. We were chased out when we tried to play a card game after dinner. I’d have to scout out a new location.
Though the Star is one of the older ships of the Norwegian fleet, she underwent an upgrade during Covid. Everything was shiny and new. It warmed my writer’s coffee-beating heart to find the coffee shop at the center of the ship. It was the next best spot to write. On our second day aboard, I grabbed a table and set about practicing the methods I set to keep up with my writing.
Central hub of the Norwegian Star | photo: eoconnors
When I travel, my writing tools are pretty basic. First drafts and daily journals are handwritten in a spiral-bound notebook. I stock up on them at Back-to-School sales every year. Second drafts get keyed into the laptop. During writing sessions, I listen to binaural beats with my earbuds to block out ambient noise and sink into a deep focus.
Some cruise days the writing didn’t go as I’d envisioned. Seats and tables were still at a premium. More than once, I invited a stranger to sit and enjoy their coffee. The cursive scrawl in my notebook sparked some curiosity and a number of conversations. I embraced the interruptions.
Every new person is a character. It sounds mercenary, I know, but I think the writers reading this will understand. Some of the best inspiration comes from real life. My favorite discussion was with a man named Zorich*, born in the country of Georgia. His family immigrated to Chicago when he was almost a teen because his father feared that Zorich would be compelled to join the Georgian army, conscripted into a conflict in the crumbling, Soviet-influenced region.
Zorich went on to describe what it was like to walk to school through gang-controlled Chicago drug territory as a Jewish, non-English speaker. The harassment, the beatings. The pressure to deal for one gang or another. And later, the night a gang shot at the hospital window where his wife was an ER nurse, but she was spared because of the bullet-proof glass.
At the center of the stories, I sensed his abiding questions about what qualifies as war, how much responsibility does an individual have to join the military, if his father made the right choice, and what it means to be a responsible citizen.
They aren’t topics to which I had ever given much thought, and we cruised through the North Atlantic, I was grateful for the new avenues of writing opened to me by a stranger.
If you’d like a closer look at our life aboard the Icon, you can read more about it on my Substack, Pole to Pole Travel with E.O. Connors.
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