Last night, and I sat down over a gin & tonic to wax & wane poetic about nostalgia. If you don’t know what The Paris Writers’ Salon is yet, well by god, here’s your chance. It’s quite simple, really: we sit down over a libation & chat about life, literature & all the rest of it.1
Birds are swooping outside my window as they sing towards the verdant canopy. I’m sitting in my our new apartment on the 6th floor of a Parisian building, overlooking the Père Lachaise cemetery. I can wave to Gertrude Stein. She’s somewhere back there, there, insisting that there’s no such thing as repetition, only insistence, and though I’ve only been properly moved into my new apartment for a few weeks, it’s already the homiest home I’ve ever known.
I moved to Paris in 2008 as a student and never truly left. The first apartment I lived in was 9m2 (96 square feet for United Statesians), and I have incrementally increased my leg-stretching space ever since.
It’s a tale as old as Parisian time: a novelist trying to find their way out of existential obscurity in the City of Light, working English teaching jobs, drinking heavily, publishing a first novel only to become a glorified receptionist for four years (to this day, they haven’t a single interesting thing to say about stocks or wearing ties), struggling to finish their second novel while teaching at the Sorbonne, finally finishing the damn thing and publishing it, and so on and so forth, until here they are, back at it again in a new Parisian apartment, the eighth Parisian home in 15 years, by their count, in what they suspect will be the most inspiring home they’ve ever known.
“A woman human must have money and a room of her their own if she is they are to write fiction.” Virginia Woolf
For the first time in my adult life,
I wake up with sunrise, and I cannot tell you what it means to wake up with the warmth of sunshine on my torso, but I can tell you I might just become a morning person.
Perhaps more importantly, for the first time in my adult Parisian life (17 years),
I have a room of my own.
For the first time in my Parisian life, I don’t have to find a café which influencers egomaniacs haven’t destroyed / find a corner of a large table in a public library. The walls are thick, too, which means I can compose music without headphones, can sing without limiting my voice, and can open the windows when the creative energies get too sweaty.
In the new room there’s also enough space for
’s photography desk, from which she conjures magic, and while it’s a great fortune, joy, and inspiration to share one’s home with a fellow artist, after sharing a 29m2 studio for four years on one of the liveliest streets in the city, I cannot tell you how much it makes a difference, immediately, for both of us to be able to close theLo and behold, having a physical space dedicated to creativity engenders creativity … who knew!
In the first two weeks of life here in my favorite part of the city (the 11th/20th), I finished one song that had been dogging me for years and wrote two new songs (one co-written with Augusta) that will become part of a full-length solo album once I find the right producer/recording studio for that adventure (those of you who dig me and my twin brother’s band, Slim and The Beast, will be happy to know we’ll be playing at Rock Bottles (18ème) on Thursday, May 22 circa 8:30pm for a night of harmonies and harmonicas).
And so all this to say, I’m back home, and it feels good, and I’ll be sharing a lot more music in the next months and short fiction, too, because I can now get back to working on the most important project, a new novel (here are a lot of reviews of my latest novel, The Requisitions), but speaking about writing a new novel is an exceedingly dangerous act and I shan’t give the Muses any reason to send their messages to those novelists writing diligently without hope, despair, or fanfare.
PS
Major thanks to the Dublin-based The Murder Capital, a post-punk band, for inspiring the above video reminding me what it means to stand for something—to stand for anything—by expressing their soul on the stage in unapologetic and radically authentic fashion.
Finally, in honor of vulnerability (once you’ve put on headphones and listened to the above video), last week I performed 3 never-before-performed songs in the cellar of the only bar in Paris I’ve ever called home (I know better than to tell you where it is), and it was quite cathartic not to be precious about such personal tunes (I can neither confirm nor deny that I got choked up rehearsing each of them countless times). Here’s to leaning into vulnerability. One of these days I’ll share the full version + the story of “Drifting Away.”
Intro to The Paris Writers' Salon
Think of the above video as an ode to the unfinished nature of everything. It is a rough draft. It shan’t be completed. The theme song is mine but I wish I’d recorded a different, cleaner version. Alas, sometimes art is simply meant to be shared, not completed … but there’s something comforting, isn’t there, about the never-ending dialogue which is Paris?
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