The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business. — John Steinbeck
Tim and I were talking before breakfast this morning. Last week — including the weekend — was exhausting, what with work and volunteer stuff at our church. We’ve also been babysitting his Mom’s dog for two weeks and let me tell you, two dogs are more than just one more dog. I don’t know why this is so, but trust me on this.
Anyway, we were thinking about our travel schedule for the next few months. First we’re going to the SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Trade Show down in Daytona, Florida at the end of the month, where Great Little Books, LLC will have a booth. We’re manning that booth (or “person-ing it” to be exact) in an effort to let the southern indie booksellers know all about our four magnificent titles: THE LONGBRIDGE DECISION, UP AT THE VILLA: TRAVELS WITH MY HUSBAND, TOO TALL ALICE and BEDTIME STORIES. Keep your fingers crossed — and if you’re an indie bookseller, please visit us at booth A6 and place a big order. Please.
Then in mid-October we’re going back up to Salem, MA to hear Margaret Marshall, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court talk about the 1629 Massachusetts Bay (Endecott) Charter, which established the right of self-government in the state. While we’re there, a dear friend is celebrating his 50th birthday and we’ll be on hand to help him. We’ll also have dinner with Mario Scalzi, president of Parker Villas, so we’ll hear all about the business and will talk about George Clooney, The American and Abruzzo.
In between these two trips, it’s likely that Tim will have to go to meet with clients far and wide. And in early November, I am going to Italy. Yes! I will be going on a tour that Kathy McCabe, editor of Dream of Italy newsletter, has put together and you’ll be hearing more about that when I get back. Umbria in the fall. Harvest time. I can smell it and taste it already. Umbria has been a dream of mine for a long time, so who better to go with than a group put together by Dream of Italy? I’m ecstatic!
Tim even talked about going to England for Christmas — another crazy dream of mine — but I’m not sure that either one of us could handle that this year. We’ll see.
So where am I going with this? I’m not sure. But I do know that in this economy, these seem like bold moves. When we looked at this list of places and trips and the reasons for going — and this list doesn’t include the two trips to Italy in the Spring which, please God, can be done back-to-back because we don’t want to pay for airfare twice — we wondered what drives us. Is it courage? Faith? Unbridled stupidity? Or just a need (at least in my case) to combine the love of words with the love of travel into something that just might make me a career some day, finances be damned? Maybe.
Neither of us got a lot of support vis-à-vis pursuing our dreams when we were growing up. For instance, I was never encouraged to dream about marriage and family as a little girl; an only child, I was too busy taking care of my quirky extended family. I was a stay-at-home child whose primary pleasure was being in my room, reading and writing or scratching around on the violin. When my mother called upstairs to see what I was doing, my standard answer was, “Don’t worry Mom, I’m not having any fun.” That’s okay; it taught me how to be pretty self-sufficient and have a fairly high tolerance for other people’s craziness, skills that have served me well over the years in advertising agencies and on church committees.
Doing what I love
But as I got older and discovered that what I wanted to be was a writer, that discovery struck terror into my parents’ hearts. While I think (I hope) they were secretly pleased about what I was writing throughout my school years, I was never sure. I’d read something aloud and they’d utter some iteration of, “You wrote that??!!?” When I was a newly married woman in her early 20s, I gave up writing so that I could support my college-attending husband (now ex). And besides, it just wasn’t fittin’ for a married woman to sit around all day writing. Right?
Ten years later, freed from the marriage, I started up again and found to my amazement that a sheaf of old poems gained me access to the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Middlebury VT. When I reminded my parents that I was going, my mother snapped, “Oh, that thing you have to pay for?” My lungs lost all their air.
My mother never lived to see either of my books published. My father chose never to come to one of my readings or to the performance of either of my plays. I had written one about the relationship between my mother and me (it had softened over the years after her death, as it always does) but even that wasn’t enough to get him in the audience. But here I am, still writing, adding the element of travel into the word exploration.
Yes, it’s a bit of a crazy life. I threw over the corporate scene in the early 1980s and have been freelancing ever since, some years more successful than others. When I decided to boldly step into the world of travel a decade ago, I kind of knew what I was in for. But I am in good company. Open a travel anthology and see what I mean. There’s life in those pages: adventure and discovery and danger and new ideas and history and great food and so much more. So I’ll continue to travel and write as long as I can and hope to keep myself and my audience entertained.
Thank you for being along for the crazy ride. Thank you for reading and commenting. It means more than you can ever know in this crazy life.
Buon viaggio!
Linda Dini Jenkins is a card-carrying Italophile, travel planner, freelance writer, and amateur photographer. Travel is her passion, so writing about her travels just comes naturally. She hopes all her travelers find a way to express their joys, surprises, and fears as they travel and gives every traveler a nifty journal to help smooth the way. Learn more…
