Q&A

Why did you choose to recall a past foreign experience, as opposed to exploring something in your immediate midst?

It was important to me to write from an outsider’s perspective, as most of my work done in this class has been about being a native New Yorker in New York City. It’s easy for Western European cities to feel comfortable, as one can usually point to more similarities than differences between there and America. But I was really never able to decide if that was true of Germany.

So which place is your favorite—Lyon, Brussels, Berlin, or New York?

Your loyalties shift when you live in a place for a time. There’s a lot of amorous fawning over one’s abroad location—it’s normal, I think, to even deprecate America from abroad and upon return. It’s a bit of a defense mechanism, but I definitely sensed it was a common way for myself and my fellow abroad students to deal with being away. There’s a lot of talk about how impossible people make it for themselves to live in the present, to actually be with the place they’re in. But I certainly find that one’s favorite place is always the place they’re currently in. You follow yourself everywhere. In these pieces, I tried to convey that who I am as a person, and how that was conveyed through my actions, were the most influential factors to my sense of place.

What are these pieces about, at their core?

They're about how when you’re in a new place for a long stretch, you still instinctively do the things you would do in your native country—eat the same things, behave the same way. I wasn’t under the constraints of needing to feel like a German, for example, because I sensed I naturally would after living in the place for 4 months. A new and unfamiliar place does not necessarily provoke a different behavioral set.

How do you engage with the authors we’ve read this semester?

The idea to write anecdotal short pieces was obviously inspired by Frazier’s style in “Gone to New York.” The incorporation of other people’s stories, and bits of history (most noticeably in the Lyon/Beaujolais segment) is reminiscent of Frazier’s style-switching between narrative and academic. But more often than not, unlike Frazier, I aimed to cover a broad range of observations, as opposed to exploring one. This is the tourist’s perspective. In the second piece, I write about a singular incident, which should express my growing comfort with the place—and is hopefully mirrored in my ability to write about it as an actual participant in the scene. The act of wandering and leading a lifestyle based on exploring is also meant to mirror Auster's "City of Glass."

How do the three pieces differ?

I wanted to write three that covered a spectrum of sentiment about the places, and my growing or dwindling sense of rooted-ness. In the first, I attempted to recount all my first impressions of the beginning days of being in Berlin, where I’m on shaky ground with the place. I wanted the tone to convey that since I was with forty kids who were my age and also native to America, I was hyperconscious of the moments in which things were unfamiliar, but that I was somewhat immune to the true feeling of loneliness that can sometimes induce. In the second, I relay an anecdote where my friends have become so comfortable in the place that they actually feel entitled to elicit a reaction from Germans, the native people. Whether it was done fairly or politely is definitely arguable, but our actions convey tremendous comfort with and control of the situation. In the third, I’m exploring places that felt very unfamiliar and unsettling by comparison. My observation of the culture is surface-deep, and my description of activity disjointed. I was sensing a tremendous lack of sense of place, and the culture divide felt more tangible, regardless of how familiar my Western European surroundings may have still been. The simple fact I was surrounded by less people like me is most of where that sentiment stemmed from.