Slowly, slowly, I am carving out some time to write in my hectic teaching schedule. It started with catching up on emails - sorry 'bout that all - and includes a somewhat half-hearted effort to finalize my admission to the Graduate Global program for international school teachers through The College of New Jersey (looks like I'm headed back to Mallorca for another summer of study and tapas after all).As inspiration to get back into more creative and ambitious projects I've been reading The Best American Travel Essay 2004, guest edited by Pico Iyer. I enjoyed my early attempts at essays about my overseas lifestyle (see "Home Alone" at worldhum.com for what I was doing when I had the time and energy).Here's series editor Jason Wilson quoting others on travel writing in his Foreword:

In their critical study of contemporary travel writing, Tourists with Typewriters, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan cast a skeptical eye on travel writers. But when it comes to the nostalgic impulse; Holland and Huggan are slightly more generous. "Travel writing, like tourism, generrates nostalgia
for other times and places, even as it recognizes that they may have 'lost' their romantic aura. Contemporary travel writing tends to be self-conscious - self-ironic - about such losses; it is both nostalgic and, at its best, aware of the deceptiveness of nostalgia." (xii)

Pico Iyer, this year's guest editor, has famously described travel writing as akin to a love story. In his essay "Why We Travel," Iyer writes, "I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment, in New York City, and lie on my bed, kept up by
something more than jet-lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully through my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them . Anyone witnessing this starnge scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in
love." (xiv)

Not sure how exactly, if at all, such sentiments will inspire my expat writings, but it's a start...