Right then, let’s bring this one home.

Here’s what I learned on my trip to Ireland and the United Kingdom.

WHY DID I GO WHERE I WENT AND DO WHAT I DID?

Starting out, I had some pretty structured ideas as to how I was going to go about conducting my informal cultural study. Everyone reading that line should find it hilarious. Most of my preconceptions revolved around the fact that I expected to find a firmly distinct and definable personality in each country, despite the fact that I was basing myself in urban centers. To recall the beginning, I expected to draw connections between Dublin’s troubled political history and radical queer art as I expected to find it. In Edinburgh, I wanted to see if I could find more working class gay fiction along the lines of some of Irvine Welsh’s characters, as well as dig up what I could of emerging queer art in anticipation of the Edinburgh Festival. As for London, I figured that if I were going to find a new sort of Violet Quill group, I would find them in the capital of the western world.

I want to get this out of the way: on virtually every count, I failed my initial mission. And yet, I consider my exploration as a whole a radiant success.

The guidelines I set for my mission before I departed weren’t poorly founded; however, they were just guidelines. It was impossible for me to predict what I would find in each of my destinations before I got there, and those points gave me a good place to jump in so I didn’t feel like I was completely lost. In each case I outgrew my goals as what I was actually finding differed from or surpassed what I expected. Every city had surprises in store, and while they weren’t the treasures I had marked on my map, I was very lucky to dig them up.

Let’s start at the beginning.

DUBLIN: IN WHICH I GO LOOKING FOR THE FUTURE AND FIND THE PAST

From literally my first day in Dublin, my soul was sold to a local LGBT centre for the purpose of organizing decades’ worth of old queer writing. At the time, I thought it was a great way to ingratiate myself with the community and make some solid connections. I didn’t realize that the time I spend in the stacks would define my experience with queer literature in Dublin.

While I was digging up contacts in Dublin, I spent my days organizing Outhouse’s two thousand or so volumes and cataloguing new donations. I took it on myself to further categorize the collection, which meant that I had to read the jacket of every book to see where it would fit best in the new system.

One of the first questions I wanted to answer in my travels was where the rest of gay fiction was hiding. In sorting through the library, I found that gay fiction, while marginalized, definitely had a presence. The history was richer than I anticipated. There were pulps dating back fifty or sixty years, in which homosexuality had to be treated ambiguously, as titillating but ultimately devastating, just to be publishable for the few marginal customers who could risk reading them. I discovered a sort of proto-gay fiction, novels and short stories almost certainly written by gay authors or sympathizers but working within cultural bounds that reduced any LGBT representation to subtext or exploitation.

The works I found from the seventies and eighties evolved into something new entirely. In addition to the big names like Edmund White and Larry Kramer, who I’ll get into more later, I found small-scale novels with a more educational and politically correct message. While they can seem almost trite or ham-handed to a modern reader with access to self-assurance and broad definition our communities offer today, they must have been revolutionary in their time. Imagine, the first time the homosexual was depicted, not as deviant or pornographic, but as a well-dressed hard-working neighbor, family member or friend. It was the antithesis to the alternative queer radicalism, the idea of a functional gay middle-class nuclear family.

As the books I was categorizing grew more contemporary, I had trouble deciding which to define as Gay History and which to put into the (I imagine) more well-circulated Culture section. At some point there seemed to be a trend for gay how-to guides: how to manage finances within a gay couple, how to find friends and lovers as a gay man, how to come out to friends and family, how to be a ‘good gay’. Gay fiction was offering positive (or at least more realistic) role models for primarily gay men for the first time, and it seems there must have been a market for those looking to live up to their expectations. I also saw a surge in both gay and lesbian erotica that surely must have been written earlier but only seemed to have finally found a market around the nineties.

However, I was most intrigued by a large collection of LGBT genre fiction. Of course it’s great for visibility and respect for the community that we have a rich tradition of gay literary fiction, but I was surprised to find authors working sexual orientation into murder mysteries, speculative fiction, high fantasy, gothic horror, and the like. Here’s a selection from some spare ramblings I never turned into a full article that can articulate my excitement at finding something more relatable:

“During my teen years, my frustration grew at the divide in my reading. All I wanted from my darker or fantastical reading was to see the reality of my existence. All I wanted from my gay reading was a break from the constant march of coming out stories, coming of age stories, camp novels, decadent stories of entitled gays removed from reality in every way. For Christ’s sake, I was bored. It would be many years before I discovered that not only could interesting fiction incorporating LGBT characters be written, but that some authors were already doing it. Stories of magical realism that not only incorporated gay or transgendered characters, but actually took the issues of sexuality and gender and created something unexpected, beautiful, and most importantly subtle out of them. Gay protagonists or supporting characters that could afford to take or leave the usual coming out sob scenes, the personal anguish and guilt, the sordid and indulgent love affairs, because there were real stories backing them up whether the traditional braces of gay fiction were there to hold them or not. Gay couples or individuals hanging out and something else could happen, because sexuality didn’t have to define a story, or the other way around. These were the things I’d been looking for all through my adolescence, and it took me years to find them.”

Here I was referring primarily to some small gay fantasy/horror collections I discovered while researching for my trip. In this library, I found the rest of a gay fiction tradition that for whatever reason I was only just unearthing. Some very prolific authors, some under pseudonyms, had been working for decades to merge their own alternate understandings of gender and sexuality into traditional genres, with varying success.

Without mincing words, some of these came across as just terrible. Many were little more than escapist fantasies, single-gendered universes where same-sex attraction was ham-handedly cemented as the norm while the author clumsily indicted homophobia, or heterosexuality and homosexuality swapped places as the cultural standard in alternate universes with an indulgent let’s-see-how-they-like-it attitude. Others fell victim to Mary Sue characters, impossibly handsome and strong and talented gay men and women battling caricatured homophobes across trope-ridden genre writing. A select few actually treated the subject matter with maturity and talent, and seemed like they might be genuinely good reads.

The subjective quality of these works wasn’t as important as the fact that authors were actually trying to remedy the deficiencies they saw in LGBT representation in the genres that mattered to them. For what it’s worth, I found LGBT genre works within the last decade to be on-par with the mainstream, and often even indistinguishable; however, that deserves its own treatment further on.

Sorting through that library gave me a broader perspective on the history of queer writing than I’d had when I started my project. At last I’d found my radical, independently-published collections and novels (including an amateur screenplay someone had tucked into the shelves, without a name or a title), as well as the Violet Quill classics, the commercial erotica, the social guides with outdated haircuts and styles petering off into irrelevance (as well as the anti-how to guides, usually more aligned with queer notions), the pulps and genre fiction, the contemporary gay lit. There’s no real mystery about why I hadn’t been exposed to a great deal of it; the consumer-driven publishing industry has reflected slow struggle for social acceptance of alternate expressions of sexuality and gender, and many works have an immature quality that hinted at mainstream integration that we’re still only beginning to see.

I should mention that I did manage to get involved in the local amateur writing community a bit, through weekly group writing sessions that I posted about on the blog previously. I even met a gay writer who shared his poetry with the group. However, I chose not to feature his work because there was nothing radically divergent about these works compared to anything else produced by the group. It wasn’t until I met him later at an event in the gay scene that I discovered he had active roles in both communities. This would be a trend for my trip, which I’ll highlight again.

Meanwhile, I didn’t manage to corner a single fresh, radical face in Dublin’s gay community. I must say that some of the drag shows I attended were brilliantly composed, despite the varied degrees of artistic respect they get from critic to critic, and I wasn’t surprised to find one of the major drag performers in the scene had also been a playwright. Drag performance has managed to stay surprisingly relevant, subversive and vital in every city I’ve visited, and it seems the scene does a good job of concealing the difficulty in binding and challenging the community with the more practical difficulty of technical performance (which is, in turn, made to look easy).

Dublin Pride also gave me a great opportunity to assess the community as an outsider who was made to feel very much like an insider. There seems to be much less cynicism in Dublin’s gay community; in fact, that applied to Edinburgh and London as well. While relatively conservative attitudes toward homosexuality and gender expression still prevail virtually the world over, better recognition and protections in Ireland and the United Kingdom seemed to result in a healthier, less divided community in all the cities I visited. From my perspective, it seemed that the higher gay circles were less isolated from the general queer community than those I would expect to find in the United States.

This may have actually been the central reason I struggled to find any cohesive radical writing circles throughout my travels. With better representation, I found that the queer people I met were less urgent about their activism and less frustrated than I’m used to back home. My struggle to find the indignation and anger I expected would continue in Edinburgh.

EDINBURGH: IN WHICH I SEEK THE CERTAIN AND LEAVE WITH MORE QUESTIONS

Of my three cities, it was in Edinburgh that I had the hardest time pinning down what I wanted to learn and how to go about doing it. With a smaller and less active scene than Dublin or London, Edinburgh had only a few places where I could offer my services, which meant fewer inroads to the community for me. While my participation was more limited, I actually took on more responsibility: planning an event for an LGBT family fete.

Followers of my blog will understand that I’m not the most family-friendly individual; however, I resolved to think of something that would incorporate artistic expression while still being elementary enough to engage children and parents alike. Taking inspiration from the bathroom stalls of a gay bar in Dublin of all places, I decided on a paper graffiti wall. Technically speaking, graffiti would count as radical written queer expression. I was quite pleased with myself for finding a way for my goal to come to me.

The graffiti wall wasn’t a perfect success, but it wasn’t a full failure either. It succeeded about as well as I could have expected. Bunches of tiny cute drawings and one Facebook-esque “Like”. It would be a stretch to try to read too deeply into anything my experiment produced, though if I had to say something I suppose the cupcakes, rainbows and flowers suggest a perky attitude within the community, especially at family events.

I found that the most productive element of my time in Edinburgh centered around my questioning of the term ‘radical’ as it pertained to the queer community. This hasn’t been specific to my travels, but I had the greatest exposure to LGBT community members in nuclear families in Scotland, and so at last I had time and cause to think about what the goals of the movement have been and what they seem to be now. I didn’t expect to be able to recognize writers reflecting the needs of the gay community moving forward if I didn’t understand our goals.

I never did come to a definitive answer. There certainly isn’t a global answer; every country has different rules regarding LGBT citizens, from sexual legality and freedom of expression to partnership benefits and reproductive support. Even at a local level, communities seem, if not divided, then not entirely unified. As the fight for gay marriage becomes the new front for the movement, the communities’ old disagreements about assimilation and radicalism have resurfaced. This seems to be more of an issue in the States than in the UK and Ireland, where by my understanding homophobia has more of a root in conservative and religious tradition than in threatened machismo, but this debate isn’t limited to any particular region. Even as the community pushes for greater domestic protections, there are grumblings from within as to whether we need to define our families by the same standards as heterosexual families, why single-partner long-term monogamy should continue to be the solely respected partnership, and if heterosexual marriage as an institution isn’t too troubled and based on sexist or socially unsound principles in the first place to be worth supporting now.

Perhaps writers of gay fiction, then, will serve every faction of the community in turn, bit by bit. Some will include the gay nuclear family without fanfare, at last normalizing the once unspeakable, and others will continue to push the boundaries of written sexual or gender expression in ways that will be fresh even to the most jaded of us. It would be harder to say which is more radical, after all, or whether that term still applies. It seems to me, at last, that the community will integrate itself into the mainstream enough that we can finally be formally divided between ourselves, judging each other across the line we’re drawing as to who needs to grow up, or who has compromised their values.

I’ve heard some say this is a crisis within the community, and a weakness opponents of LGBT acceptance can exploit. I think differently; I believe that our battle is already won, acceptance is the new rule whatever anyone says, and this classic division of values is a sign of a strange sort of progress. Someday (and it may already be here in small pockets), two stodgy old married lesbians are going to be complaining to their equally elderly friends in their living room about their vegan polysexual non-monogamous son who spends all his time with his liberal friends, and he’s going to be telling his mates how his two mothers spend all their time listening to conservative talk radio, and everyone’s going to take the victory these typical hostilities represent for granted.

But there again I’ve let myself ramble. I mentioned that Edinburgh was the greatest challenge for me because I didn’t have a defined path, and that I kept running into more questions without real answers, the sort of questions every queer academic unearths and obsesses over before putting them back where they found them for the sake of their sanity. It wasn’t just in the gay community that I found questions without answers, however. I had a brief stint with a writing group which turned out to be very similar to the one I found in Dublin, right down to discovering a member or two of the group who later turned out to be active in the gay scene as well. Again, I decided not to feature these writers because one or two individuals who lead lives in both the local writing and gay communities don’t exactly make a solid circle, and their work, while quality, didn’t exhibit anything that I found essential to this project. I was getting closer to a truth that I suspected before my project began: individuals didn’t necessarily show an intersection in their identities as writers, LGBT community members or citizens of their cities. Which was grand, but I came to find and study individuals where the intersection was essential to their artistic expression. This was proving more and more difficult.

To satisfy my own curiosity, as well as to flesh out my project a bit, I set up an interview with an Edinburgher (again, not the proper word) to pick his brain about publishing and the state of the arts in Edinburgh. Andrew J. Wilson represented Writer’s Bloc, a local spoken word group made up of several published writers and performers, as well as representing himself. Andrew works in publishing and has had a great deal of his work published in various formats, so I was thrilled that he agreed to meet me in a pub and answer my questions about the local scene and what I can expect in the future as I try to make a name for myself.

By the sound of it, Writer’s Bloc has been great for the community and the artists it serves. I understand it’s a great way to try out pieces the members have been working on in new ways, to see what grabs the audience and get a different kind of criticism line by line. Edinburgh seems to be a city where spoken word can get the audience it deserves; I’m assured that with the festival and arts culture Edinburgh is known for, the audience is more primed to think about the format and appreciates it better than they might elsewhere in the country. The Festival and Fringe (a program of less formal events started as an alternative to the Festival’s more mainstream appeal) provide a platform for the artists to present themselves and the impetus and exposure they need to succeed. Of course, this is all second-hand and I can’t give it the treatment Andrew did, but I was very assured as to the secure livelihood of spoken and written expression in Edinburgh, and how storytelling is perennially revitalizing itself for new audiences.

At some point in our conversation, I asked Andrew what was next for the publishing industry. I didn’t phrase it like that, I had a little more tact and put plenty of semi-articulate twists on it, but that was the base question I was trying to answer. Anyone with an ear to the ground, even a new initiate like me, hears worrying things for the business. Talk about how the industry has been irrelevant for years, how electronic publishing and a movement toward self-publishing digitally may be the future. Bloggers arguing that writing as we know it is dead or that authors have empowering opportunities they’ve never had, with virtually the same talking points. I wanted to know what changes Andrew thought I should prepare myself for, how to get my work where it could be seen. And while Andrew offered me several great practical pointers, there is the reality that nobody knows quite yet what’s going to happen next.

So Edinburgh was a strange adventure for me. I came with vague questions about community and the future, and all I learned was how to further refine and split those questions into a lot of equally squiggling uncertainties. Half of what I learned is difficult to articulate, impressions and ideas for and about myself and what I could be. I didn’t find anything that I came looking for, but I was getting a broader picture of where I was going than I expected.

Luckily for my original thesis, I still had one adventure yet. And if I couldn’t find what I was looking for in London, I wasn’t going to find it anywhere else in the world.

LONDON: IN WHICH THE SUBVERSIVE ELEMENTS ARE ALIVE AND WELL

My time in Edinburgh and Dublin helped me realize that unless I could find a way to tie myself into the population of London, my project was going to suffer. However, London is much larger than Dublin or Edinburgh, with a population almost eight times that of both cities combined. I decided to abandon my previous tactic of digging into one focal point, and instead I drifted (with structure) around London for my month. I wanted to soak up as much of as many aspects of the city as I could. In thirty days, I was going to know what it was like to live in London.

And on that point, at least, I succeeded brilliantly.

For the first week, I decided to finally dig into my collection of author interviews to try to better understand the literary tradition I was working with. I had a passing familiarity with the works themselves from past reading and from my work in Dublin, but this was the first time I was sitting down to listen to what these men had to say for themselves.

I was most thrown by how little these authors had in common, aside from some key experiences in the process of growing up gay and coming out in a society that wasn’t ready. They came across as pretentious as often as working class, prudish and explicit, sympathetic and cold. I thought they all had a certain hardness to them that I didn’t feel experienced enough to qualify; it could have been the gay experience in America as much as their hardships in writing or middle-age in general. I was surprised to find that I had expected a sort of unity of purpose between these writers. Instead, I found they could be harshly critical of each other’s works, that they could confess their idolizations or hatreds where they knew they’d be read by each other without caring.

It wasn’t that I pictured all the gay writers of the pre-AIDS era sharing a flat together, but I believe I expected a sort of truce between them for the sake of the movement, not to hear them talking about each other like strangers they’d read about. Whatever their works might have said, I didn’t expect the doubt and cynicism and anger I encountered. In a way, it was exactly what I was looking for in my project, but I didn’t realize how isolating these attitudes must have been. It made me realize that my project, to find an informal collective of new queer writers who had an idea of what has to come next, might have been doomed by my own naivete from the start.

Of course, it was. But that has little to nothing to do with my adventures in London, and the brilliant radical queer expression I did eventually find alive there.

For the sake of my project as well as my own personal safety as a traveler, I opted to stay with LGBTQ hosts for the remainder of my trip. My hosts covered a range of ages, from as young as myself to well into middle age, and they all had an opinion on the local gay scene and the artistic types I might find within it. I was made to understand that Soho has been the traditional gay village for decades, for better or worse. East London and Vauxhall lack the regality of Soho and are known for an artsier crowd, perfect for me to meet with some performers who might know how new talent has traditionally risen to the surface in London.

If Edinburgh showed me the family-friendly future of the LGBTQ community, then London reminded me that we still have some subversive kick left in us, primarily in exposing attitudes toward sexism, racism, heteronormativity, and a number of other long words I’ve seen primarily used in academic arguments without being put to practical use. At night, in the bars, clubs and streets of London (because it couldn’t have happened anywhere else), I saw puppet shows, musical performances, anatomical lessons, spoken word, dramatic reenactments, documentaries, and a litany of other media shaking up an audience to make points, from the ham-handed to the hopelessly abstract. They were furious. They were manic and hopeful. They were alternately disgusting and elegant, sometimes at once. A few outright broke the law, and while I got a juvenile giggle out of organized naughtiness, I also respected that at least in some parts of the world, there were queers professional and amateur still willing to push every boundary in the way to get their message across.

By day I sought out members of the community who managed to make a living defending and participating in the arts. I found a gay bookshop over thirty years old, the last of its kind in the United Kingdom, called Gay’s The Word. It was a mystery to me that this store had managed to survive so long, and I couldn’t gauge whether it was suffering or thriving. It was a small shop, but every time I visited it was full of patrons. From one of the managers I got the number of a local drag fabulist named Dickie Beau, who is well-known in performance circles in London. He told me about his work on several brilliant compilations exploring and combining ‘traditional’ drag and theatre techniques as well as what he calls ‘found sound’, audio clips from various sources (including celebrity and artist interviews).

Over lunch, we talked about London’s relationship with the arts, and how despite rough economic times the world over London still had enough appreciation for the avant-garde that some of Dickie’s projects could receive Arts Council funding. I wondered how willing any arts group in the States would be to support such an unorthodox line of performance as Dickie’s. It was from Dickie that I learned that the avant-garde was still alive in London, in small pockets banded together in flats here and there, which was encouraging news even if I didn’t find much of the community itself beyond the performances I attended.

My hopping back and forth between queer hosts gave me an opportunity to observe some common tastes. Queer Londoners certainly have an appreciation for fiction. I believe everyone had a copy of some Neil Gaiman books (including me), the Harry Potter series, and other fantasy and speculative fiction. I can’t say that this is particular to the queer community, but in my life in the States I’ve found a similar appreciation for the fantastic in the community. This trend continues in the television shows watched. Those old enough to have seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer or X-Files during their original runs (or those with the DVD box sets) still held their old enthusiasm, and current shows like True Blood and Doctor Who in particular still have a very strong following within the community.

With fantastic television traditionally seen as the province of ‘geeks’, many of these shows recognize and address the inherent outcast stigma their audiences may experience; this recognition of the issue of being an ‘outsider’ carries across to LGBT audiences as well. These shows also generally support or include LGBT characters in common, even if it’s not central to the plot. In fact, it seems almost key that queer issues can come up within the show in a positive context without being the focus (I found very few people interested in, say, Queer As Folk or other shows focused on aspects of the gay community). It might be that generations that have grown up in the struggle for LGBT protections are preparing for a world where sexuality can come up without everyone having to stop and address it. Even within the reaches of the queer community, it seems that normal is the new radical, and vice versa.

And with that observation, we finally arrive at what I believe is the future of writing for gay authors and readers.

WHAT IS NEXT FOR GAY LITERATURE?

After three short months, I hesitate to say that I can predict any grand trends for the publishing industry. There’s the possibility that I missed something big, and that there could be a radical new direction in gay writing taking the stage in a year or two. From my own experience, however, I believe I can say that the future of gay fiction and literature is less Edmund White and Larry Kramer and more Chuck Palahniuk and Clive Barker. These two authors have made huge names for themselves, and yet it was completely by accident that I discovered that they were both gay men. Which isn’t to say that I think coming authors are going to suppress all coverage of their sexuality, but it is encouraging that upcoming queer writers can choose their own genre and expression without being obligated to address the same issues of coming out and homophobia and the limitations of the community again and again.

I mentioned that I met a few amateur writers who happened to be gay, and that I chose not to profile their work. While again it was quality, I didn’t find anything that I defined as new or striking. Not that this is a bad sign for the LGBT movement in writing. As I said before, it seems that the new radical thing within the community is to be normalized to the point that issues of sexuality and gender don’t become the focal point in daily life or in artistic expression. That isn’t to say that queers are assimilating (that would be a different and altogether thornier topic); rather, the issues that are central to our causes are being recognized and taken up by the mainstream so we don’t need to have the same conversations over and over again.

It was in this project that I had the most difficulty I’ve had in trying to define gay writing. That’s because at last, at least to a small degree, straight authors are recognizing and including queer characters and issues at nearly the rate we’re actually represented in society. Similarly, enough queer authors are making fiction that doesn’t center on queer issues frequently enough that it’s hard to say whether their work fits the tricky label of gay fiction. It’s becoming very difficult to distinguish the sexuality of an author from their work alone.

While not precisely ‘radical’, for whatever that means, it is sort of new, and a sign of progress of a kind. It seems the avant-garde is still alive and well, at least in some places, and giving queer artists the opportunity they need to address issues that are still relevant. The fact that queer artists aren’t limited to the fringe of artistic expression comes as a relief from the imposed duty of the last few decades. I’m particularly relieved that whatever direction my writing takes, it won’t be mitigated by set expectations for me as a gay author.

CONCLUSION

So I’ve narrated my academic arc for my three-month travel, and I still haven’t told the whole story. Here are just a few random tangents and observations to help you understand what I got out of this adventure:

You would expect, after three months of interacting with amateur writers in small local circles, that I would have some great wisdom or impressions about the process to bring back. And of course I still don’t. It’s hard for me to judge the practical use of the social writing circle exercise, because each circle is different. Success, as subjective an idea that is, seems to depend largely on the writers that make up each group. I did understand that it seems to help a great deal if group members take part in an active writing community outside of the group; the writers I met all knew the local festivals and get-togethers and big local names that were finally getting their big breaks. I also think it helps to have a group composition with writers interested in a variety of genres, just because I can only take so many sentimental family pieces before I tune out.

It would be futile for me to try to determine which values I thing the gay community should carry going forward. Not just futile, but terribly presumptuous. My community exposure did help to reaffirm that I don’t believe that LGBTQ community members pushing for family-related rights and protections are selling out or assimilating, no more than the radical elements of the community are motivated by pure spite and short-sightedness. There’s no ‘right way’ to participate in the community, as long as everyone’s rights are respected.

I don’t know yet what it means for me to be a gay writer. I expect my writing will involve the community or alternate sexuality or gendered characters more frequently than mainstream fiction, but my writing is going to reflect my own reality (even when I’m writing speculative fiction). I also anticipate mainstream writing meeting me halfway, and in a few years it might be hard to tell which writers are gay or straight without reading their book jackets or Wikipedia pages. I haven’t solved the conundrum of whether I have a ‘duty’ to the community to represent us more frequently for the sake of balance. I know that I won’t do anything to compromise how natural my writing feels and sounds to me, but beyond that, I’ll have to produce something and see.

Of course I realized from my first plane trip that the Phillips committee didn’t give me this scholarship because they expected I was going to unearth some vital piece of information about the future of gay fiction that the academic world just had to know. I’ve known the entire time that this scholarship has been about having the opportunity to hop around the world without a safety net. I can say that this program has made me a certified traveler. In every city I visited, I can point out the major and minor hostels, where to get a hot lunch in every culinary branch, how to get around, all the major sites, a good deal of the local history, some awesome locals, and how much the cheapest bottle of wine costs in any given supermarket. It’s a major point of pride that I managed to make it around the world and back alive with minimal outside assistance (aside from the $7,000 from the committee, a few emergency phone calls to the States for food, and one bus ticket). I don’t think a day goes by that I’m not struck with awe at how lucky I’ve been to have this chance and how much my travels have changed the way I see myself and my home.

When I consider everything I learned on this trip, I think I cherished having the impetus to start this blog most of all. I have had a blast writing these posts. I’ve had an opportunity to develop a narrative voice that is uniquely my own, and for the first time in my life I’ve realized the power of my writing to entertain others. By the time you read this, this blog will have over four thousand hits. For a small semi-academic blog with nothing to offer but some camera pictures and the incoherent ramblings of a newly graduated English major, I think this did pretty well.