Writing my way home
A reflection on writing 'English Republic of Letters', two months in
In nearly 40 years of travel and living overseas, there's a question that stumps me every time.
Whether I'm in a restaurant or strolling around a city, when someone asks, “Where’s home for you?” it feels both easy and impossible to answer.
Home is usually the country, city, flat, where I am living with my immediate family. But what the questioner usually means is “Where are you from?”
“Ah, I’m from Devon,” I reply.
Depending on where I am in the world, I may need to clarify where this is.
Or I may just say “I’m from England,” hoping to avoid further questions.
But I can never quite be sure, in this nomadic lifestyle, whether there’s a clear answer to where home is.
One possibility I have explored is “home is the place I write to." That final preposition, “to” upends the expected outcome of “home is where I write,” which is grammatically normal, a plausible answer to the question and yet not something I believe to be particularly true for me. After all, I can write from anywhere - a library, a café, a train or a park bench.
Nothing to write home about?
“Home is the place I write to” was actually a pretty good formulation for over 40 years. From university, from Santa Cruz de Tenerife, from all the many cities and countries I have lived in over the years, I sent letters (then emails) home to my parents. I wrote initially in my spidery, borderline illegible handwriting (see an example below) and then, when I got my first typewriter, in poorly typed scripts that at least, in marked contrast to their handwritten predecessors, would give up their entire contents on a first reading.
These letters would take time to arrive, contain an update on my work, places I might have visited and, occasionally, glimpses into the complications of my love life (as we used to call it then). Sometimes, I would add a newspaper clipping or two about me. All pretty mundane. Looking back, my letters home were nothing to write home about.
But they were clearly directed to a place and people - and were, I think, lovingly received as filial missives from the great beyond, complete with airmail envelope and foreign stamps. I knew who I was writing to and where I was writing to.
(Except that time when my parents moved without letting me know their next address. My mother would later claim it was an oversight. Or that the whole thing never happened. There was always a suspicious lack of consistency in her story).
In reality, for certain parts of the year my parents would be travelling, usually on a boat, so I wouldn’t actually know where they were when I wrote. But I was writing to a certain address, knowing that they’d get the letter sooner or later. So yes, I knew where I was writing to. I was writing home.
And then they were gone.
My father died early in 2020. And my mother died a year ago. My letters home ceased.
Nowhere to write to
In my loss, I felt abandoned, a little like García Márquez’s long-suffering Colonel,1 with the difference that, while he had no one to write to him, I have nowhere to write to. In Spanish, the title of the novella has a greater sense of bereavement - ‘ el coronel no tiene quien…’; ‘the Colonel doesn’t have anyone…’
And I no longer have anyone or anywhere.
Well, of course, I do have other people to write to. But no place to send “my letters home”. Nowhere to write them to.
As an “adult orphan” (I’ve only just found out it’s a thing), I am in a new place at this late stage in my life. I am also experiencing a new “no-place”, this “nowhere to write to”.
What’s in a Name?
I began this Substack newsletter in September 2023, 10 months after my mother died. For the first time, I find myself wondering: in creating this newsletter, was I creating a new home to write to?
I look at the name I chose, English Republic of Letters. It’s a place. The title uses the word ‘letters’ (albeit in a different sense). Yet, I tell myself, there were particular historical and literary reasons for my choosing this title, reasons which I explained here.
I hadn’t made the connection between this newsletter and my losing my parents until now. But was I trying to find a new place to send my letters home to?
After my father died, I attended an online seminar on grieving facilitated by my then employer and given by experts from the excellent UK charity on bereavement, Cruse. I recall that one image they had of the feeling of grief was that of being in the middle of a dark forest. Coming out of the worst periods of grief was like stumbling through the trees towards a place of more air and light. I couldn’t help making a link to Dante’s dark forest at the start of the ‘The Divine Comedy’. I am well past the “middle way” of my life, but was I similarly lost, with the path hidden from me?
While I’m processing this, let me pause and look at my conscious reasons for founding the English Republic of Letters.
An English Republic of Letters
I came to this platform (or so I thought until a few minutes ago) to improve my writing, find an audience and work out some thoughts about my life, one which has been lived on five continents in some of the world’s greatest cities and during which I’ve been lucky enough to experience the beauty of many different cultures.
So I measured out my little patch of earth, put up a little banner saying “English Republic of Letters” and started writing, not really knowing what to expect.
Since then, I feel lucky to have found some wonderful readers. Two months in, the newsletter’s just passed its first milestone, reaching 100 subscribers a few days ago.
Don’t worry, I don’t intend to write a “growth post” by stealth. But I do want to thank all of you for subscribing and reading. It means a lot to me. And I’ve been hugely appreciative of your comments on my essays so far. They - you - are keeping me writing. Thank you!
I also wanted to give thanks to those who have shown special kindness and given an especially warm welcome to me as I join this rather special community of readers and writers. So, thank you,
, , among so many others.I believe that Substack is, in a sense, a Republic of Letters; at least, that feels true of the small corner I inhabit. I generally feel pretty much at home here (that word again), though since I’m not really hardwired for social media, I find Notes a bit of a challenge.
It hasn’t always been easy to negotiate the quiet pools along the banks of Substack River without getting pulled from my moorings by the quickening current in the middle. So I am grateful for the wisdom of people like
, , . And a special mention to , who is a fabulous editor and great to work with.I am pleased, even surprised, that the number of you subscribing continues to increase - it’s great to have more readers. To be honest, I was glad to get to my first and only milestone out of the way before the end of the year. I’m conscious that millstones and milestones are of a similar weight, so I aim to stay pretty relaxed about the next 100 and the numbers thereafter. If I was a marketer, I’d want to understand all this better, but my curiosity is currently employed elsewhere.
I’d rather focus on understanding what works and what doesn’t work for you, my readers. As ever, any comments you may have will be gratefully received.
A Substack Reader
I was a Substack reader before a writer, following just one Substack, Anne Helen Petersen’s hugely popular
, for well over a year before I started writing here. I now enjoy a perpetual flow of great newsletters into my inbox. There are simply too many for me to read all of them each time, but I’m gradually working out which ones are my favourites, while still discovering new ones that I just have to subscribe to. I’ve learnt a lot, been entertained or blown away, and I’ve also seen some great models to learn from. I’ve realised that if there’s one thing I enjoy more than writing on Substack, it’s reading on it.Writing my way home
So, back to my motivation for being here. While writing this post, it’s been an interesting and even emotional experience to consider whether this newsletter came into being to take the place of my letters home. It’s a touching thought, though probably only a fraction true. But then again, do we ever completely understand our motives in life?
In any case, I will cherish the idea that a subconscious part of me that may have steered my long-term, now truncated, practice of writing to my parents towards the English Republic of Letters.
But rather than writing home, I’m now writing my way home.
I might parse that as finding my own way to write. Or finding a home for my writing. It’s probably a bit of both, but I also think it means I’m finding a trajectory, a way out of the forest. The destination is still unknown, but it feels good to be on the move.
‘El coronel no tiene quien le escriba’ (‘No One Writes to the Colonel’)
Thank you, Yi Xue. I have to say that these feelings came as a surprise to me. And I hope that time is far off for you!
I am new to you Jeffrey, but this was a beautifully moving essay - thank you.