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I grew up in Brooklyn. I can picture the Brooklyn of my childhood and youth with photographic clarity. I can also picture with great clarity places I have never physically visited: the Algeria of Albert Camus’s childhood as he described it in The First Man; the pastoral England of Thomas Hardy; the New England whaling world of Herman Melville; the southern small town feel in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The richness of these settings is a gift to readers. They not only allow us to travel in imagination but they help us fathom what we want our life to mean.
      
By inhabiting an author’s St. Petersburg, Paris or Savannah we rework our understanding of the universe. We augment our understanding of class and privilege as we watch tea served from a silver samovar. We change our mind about how much personal space we need as we live with a character in her under-the-eaves Paris studio. We recalibrate our conception of race relations as we attend an all-white private club luncheon waited on by an all-black wait staff. We are not in “the real” St. Petersburg, Paris or Savannah: we are in a place the author has created, learning what the author intends us to learn.

I am especially fascinated by the way that creative and existential people congregate in certain places like Paris, San Francisco, and Greenwich Village, places that I’ve dubbed stops on the International Bohemian Highway. Naturally, we must do our living and our creating exactly where we find ourselves. But we are still pulled to certain spots and want to spend time there. This is a natural tug that is good to acknowledge—and worth doing something about!

If place interests you as much as it does me, you might enjoy my books A Writer’s San Francisco and A Writer’s Paris.

To explore place in the flesh, you might enjoy one of my workshops held in locales like San Francisco and Taos.