ARCHIVE FOR KL Pereira

I've always been a bit obsessed with cities. And since I've never had a license, and frankly, prefer to hoof it, walking is the way I experience them. Cultural theorist Michel de Certeau has a brilliant essay on this very topic called "Walking in the City" and though I loved me some theory back in my grad school days, I rarely find myself going back to it to inspire my creative work.

So I was pretty darn delighted to learn about the Flaneur Walk Pamphlet Series, a poetic/conceptual walking tour of a city that is created by writers and …

I’ve got a project going.

It started one day a few years ago. My friend V and I are skulking around the shelves at Harrison’s Comics in Salem. V is super pregnant and we’re stocking piling stacks of must-reads for her fetus (who ends up being an amazing kid, but that’s getting ahead). The fetus can’t read yet but we’ve decided to gather all the best singles and trades for when she’s old enough to read them

The only way to find the story is to lose the moment. Forget checklists, guidebooks, and maps. Stop asking for directions. Walk the crumbling footpaths and forget where you're going, where you are. 

It never occured to me that losing my way would give me direction, but it did. The picture above was taken two weeks ago in the city of Pompeii. I had no map. My idea of Pompeii was circumscribed by a diarama I'd done as a child, and though I had to realize, I tell myself now, that the city was surely larger than a shoebox, I roamed Pompeii without care

We call it Museday. Once a week, we sit around the table (usually in classroom one) and the magic starts flying. Which presenters are we featuring this week in the newsletter? When is the winner of the 2015 Book Prize, Josh Weil’s session (and wasn’t that novel fabulous)? What’s the deal with the dance party this year? How can we connect meaningfully with presenters and attendees on social media?

One of the things I look forward to the most is teaching in the YAWP program at Grub Street. Not just because teens are awesome writers (if you haven’t read their work on this blog, you really should), but because they are innovative, they see and seek connections, angles, perspectives that would never occur to me.