When a journey goes beneath the surface.
London, 2003 & 2023.
I don’t know why I’m surprised that I haven’t been able to translate into language what the experience of this recent profound wandering has been in my life. Though I want to write about how it was out there, my body hasn’t been able to process much of what happened. Except that this journey was profound, and one definition of that word is extending far beneath the surface.
If you’re reading this newsletter for my classes, workshops, and retreats, scroll to the bottom where I’m listing some new offerings.
After my last newsletter, friends wrote me back, asking if I was okay, and suggesting I say more. I am very okay. My body is thriving. I’m just not familiar with where I’ve arrived.
I was talking with a friend about each of our journeys away from North America for nearly three months, and how difficult it is to respond to questions like, how was the trip? Much of the tourist industry supports the notion of a travel experience that takes us away from our ordinary concerns.
I went to heaven! my friend joked, and we laughed at the shattering of our expectations with the discovery of how damned untidy wandering can be. It’s the difference between what it’s like to travel for a week or two, (visiting a few cultural attractions a day, letting oneself be served, letting someone else deal with moving your shit) vs settling in to be with the people and the land. One way is touristing and the other is pretty much living and includes organizing all of the logistics it takes to procure and make food, clean spaces, learn weather patterns, find one’s way, negotiate money—all we do to stay alive, keep others safe, and hopefully understand something about the place. Ordinary, but also extraordinary.
One day in Lisbon we encountered two women who looked exhausted coming off a giant cruise ship into the sunny port. They hadn’t booked one of the incessant street tours that ran through the cobblestoned alleys of our apartment in the Alfama district. What was there to do here? they asked us, and we pointed down the arc of the glistening sea to the masses of others, swarming in the gold-slanted afternoon. We didn’t know. We were drinking out of pineapples and sharing stories with my sister and her husband, trying to find fresh seafood for lunch, and weaving our way toward some local joint. Travel demands a kind of ragged curiosity. If you’re in discovery, you can’t know what there is in advance.
Describing how it was is impossible if wandering has done what you asked it to do—bring you to something you didn’t envisage. Alter you. Animate the mysterium. Knock you off your game. Initiate you to another reality. Not only do I not know much of what happened out there, but, after this journey, I don’t know who I am. I’m confronted with both the fragility and the indelibility of human powers, far from any reason why I went out there to begin with.
The thing is, we went. The gift was in the going. The intention was important, but more essential was the way we lost any sense of being in control of anything. We were not making a paradise of new beliefs. We slid into the place of not being the doers at all.
Still, here is a story.
For the fourth time, we went back to London. That city was the end of the journey, the final destination, and I wanted to saturate myself with art.1
The first time we came to this city was in 2003 when our youngest child was invited to perform with their high school orchestra and choir. No one in our family of four had been to Europe. Encouraged by the invitation alongside finally having a savings account, Richard and I signed up as chaperones. On that trip to London, Cambridge, and Oxford, we helped the teenagers we were assigned to get to their performances, find Indian food and a village chippy, and nurse them through colds and anxieties.
That first visit twenty years ago we were at the beginning of a war. We were in London on February 15, 2003, when it had been announced that millions might take to the streets to march against the threatened attack on Iraq. On one of those days in the foggy city, the chaperones called a hurried meeting in a dingy hotel room. We sat perched on twin beds and a window sill as administrators urgently informed us that our tour schedule was being rearranged so that the students would be inside institutions and away from the streets when the “potentially violent” march took place. There was a list of acceptable places for the students to be. We were to assure the school that we would check student’s rooms each night and morning, (some parents even suggested taping the doors,) and to be with them throughout all hours of the protest.
Why was this necessary? I asked.
The Battle in Seattle was horrific! one mother responded. Terrorism in our city! said another.
What about the possibility of them studying a living history? I asked.
Too dangerous, the teachers responded, everyone nodding their heads in agreement.
Our eldest, a high school student, had been involved with the mostly peaceful 1999 WTO protests where labor leaders, farmers, and social justice and immigrant groups organized to shut down the trade meetings and emphasize their disagreement with a widening wealth gap.2 The adults in the meeting that day didn’t want to imagine the power of civil unrest, only their views of news coverage that amplified the destruction of property and the tear gassing of protesters by police. I wanted to create a different lived experience from the parents who were fearful of riots or crowd violence. I wanted to trust these kids to be with their curiosity and anti-war leanings.
After we left the meeting, Richard and I conferred and decided that if our group of teenagers wanted to go to the Stop the War protest, we would make a way for them to do so. With the kids, we made a plan for how we would enter the march, and what we’d need to do if we lost each other. The next day, we lined up for the British Museum, went to an exhibit, and then met our group at the predetermined location to enter the streams converging toward Piccadilly Square. We rounded the corner into a mass of people, signs, puppets, balloons, and banners, as far as we could see. Whistles shrieked and then surged to a roar like the churn of a raging sea. I cried looking into the faces of grandmothers, babies, nuns, students, country folk and urban dwellers, punks and professors, even a church choir. There would be 1.5 million people on the streets that day in London, and 600 cities around the world would mount giant marches and rallies. Later, traveling back to the hotel on the Tube, the kids fresh from the theatre, holding their My Fair Lady programs, a rowdy goth chastised us for being tourists—I guess some of us played while others took a stand today. Our group was silenced by our need to seem compliant with the school authorities. We said nothing back, but we knew what we had done.
Two decades later, back in London, we discovered that there would be another protest, this time to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. On November 11, 2023, Armistice Day in the UK, hundreds of thousands of people were expected to converge at Marble Arch and march toward the U.S. embassy. We read the news of the protest in the Times from the breakfast room of our Bloomsbury hotel, a rich-toned, 1800s mansion papered in the faces of white colonists, serving soft-boiled eggs and soldiers.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman had drawn anger for accusing police of being too lenient with pro-Palestinian protesters, saying, “The hate marchers need to understand that decent British people have had enough of these displays of thuggish intimidation and extremism.” The London police promised to clamp down on any protester who acted out of line. The Prime Minister’s office called the protest “provocative,” and “disrespectful” to veterans. I contacted a friend in London who decided not to go, worried about potential fighting. Everywhere we looked, it seemed that people’s fears were being amplified.
We were clear that we had all of the privilege, and that there was no bravery in our protesting. Our white bodies would not be at risk. In this protest for an end to the bombing of Gaza, we wanted to show up for some urgent and necessary disruptive nonviolent resistance, to take a stand against the belief in human expendability. We were in despair for the horrors of October 7th in Israel, and we were clear after consulting with Jewish, Muslim, and Arab friends and writers, that militarization wouldn’t be a way toward resolving the conflict.
Just like that moment twenty years ago, on November 11th we rounded the corner to move toward Hyde Park and saw throngs of marchers a mile before the beginning of the route. Heading toward the starting point was a little boy on his father’s shoulders, a Palestinian flag tied around his shoulders and covering both their bodies. This day would be spent following families, students, elders, and people of many faiths and ancestries until the path became so full of bodies that it split into two and then three streams. We fell back so I could keep some distance, my health precarious in crowds, and so that Richard could rest, his body in pain from an injury. We spent that day following, photographing, chanting, and talking with people who had made the journey.
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t the 800,000 Free Palestine supporters who were disruptive but instead a group of 150 far-right white nationalists and Islamophobes who erupted in scuffles. Police attempted to stop them when they surged toward the Cenotaph in the ceremony’s moment of silence. The Mayor of London pinned the blame for that violence on Braverman, who he claimed had stoked the tension and stirred up people on the far right. Indeed, a day after the protest, Braverman had been sacked.
The sight in London that day was not violent. Everywhere we went in the city that day was full of people who had come to ask for a cease-fire. We had been welcomed to their call for an end to military solutions for problems that might be negotiated.
Next up: I’m working a little backward as these essays come to mind, but up next there will be pieces on art in London, fado music in Portugal, the mysteries of Puglia, life on Sardegna, and more. Please pass these on to your friends if you know someone who needs a little wandering in their life.
A poem to stay away from rules that make you otherwise than who your heart tells you to be.
Trans Santa delivers gifts to trans youth in need and has become one of my favorite holiday traditions. This organization takes the “adopt a family” approach and provides gifts to transgender youth in need — safely and anonymously. Read the letters and send a gift that will in most cases, help a young LGBTQ+ person survive. These young people face extraordinary risk, as anti-trans legislation and social isolation can lead to unsafe conditions in abusive or unstable housing situations. In 2022 alone, state legislatures across the U.S. have introduced over 130 anti-trans bills, and the lives of our trans youth are more at risk than ever. Don’t listen to me, go read their stories in their own words, and give today.
This essay by Kiese Laymon in the Bitter Southerner brought back some of my first loves: “And the restaurant right off 1-55, at the first Batesville exit, where Highway 6 takes you to Oxford, has the best pecan pie and sweet potato pie on earth. They only sell it by the slice, though, and on my worst days — which were also my best days in Oxford — I’d drive down to Batesville, pick out two pieces of each, look over at all the fish, chicken, potato salad, macaroni and cheese, greens, and green beans and just feel so happy to be home, in a place where brutality leaves bruises, and a place that truly expects incredible restaurants to serve gas.”
Kavita Das, a writer I had the chance to meet at a Tin House workshop, takes on the subject of writing with a conscience. Yes, our work is by its nature political.
WORKSHOPS & RETREATS:
This winter and spring, I’ll be bringing some of my favorite reading and writing practices to the Pacific Northwest and am thrilled to soon announce dates and locations for a retreat and a series of workshops. I’m grateful to be back in the rooms with writers, and looking forward to hearing your words. If you’d like to apply, please write me at sonyalea@gmail.com, or respond to this email.
Here are some new ones that writers have been asking for—
VISION & LINEAGE: FOOD WRITING AS CEREMONY
One of the most powerful ways to express love is through food. We grow our capacity for love from hearing other’s stories. In this retreat we eat, write, and listen to each other’s stories about food as a reclamation ceremony.
Food is culture and community, history and art, lineage and vision, medicine and ceremony, tradition and experiment. Our stories sometimes lack an awareness of the politics of how food comes to the table. This retreat will include talks about how we might change this pattern, including attention to how writing about food has included erasure and appropriation, inattention to agricultural roots and impacts, and the links with food to environmental justice. If you’re working in narrative nonfiction, memoir, recipe forms, newsletter writing, literary food writing, or fiction, this will be a good place to understand how food shapes character. Together, we will explore using the senses, and develop some research strategies to explore the origins of foodways and our chosen subject. Through generative writing exercises and sharing of our projects, we not only document impactful food experiences but also restore food narratives to a place of relationship and integrity.
You’ll have a chance to read the short works of Monica Ali, Laurie Colwin, Barbara Kingsolver, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Kevin Young. We’ll read essays on farmers facing climate change, making sorghum the right way, Houston hip-hop and Chinese chicken, beans and rice, historic lunch counters, Tennessee tamales, lemon meringue pie, country music cookbooks, and our complicated love affair with tomatoes. You’ll come away with a short piece about a pivotal food memory in your or your character’s life.
Friday afternoon arrival, Sunday afternoon departure. Likely will happen on the May long weekend.
This is a retreat that’s focused on craft talks by the instructor and discussion of masterworks, as well as generative writing. Every writer is welcome, including writers just beginning their practice and those working on a specific project.
There will be material to read in preparation for the retreat. No one is required to share or receive feedback. Sonya will provide comments for all those wishing to receive feedback.
Max: 20 students
LIBERATING NARRATIVES
This four-week online program creates a way to liberate our narratives by asking questions about our writing and the ways we experience our stories. We’ll give ourselves a relaxed space in which to bring awareness to our narratives. We will write beyond the ways we’ve told a story to ourselves and others.
This is a generative course to learn to blend our writing with philosophy, magic, timelessness, and other otherworldly practices of one’s imagination. For writers of a ‘personal’ narrative, inquiry into communal liberation can move a personal story beyond the self, situating it within a relational landscape. For fiction writers, this is the time to develop awareness of the philosophic backgrounds of your characters and to explore the ancient or historic lines that inhabit your story. We will look at models of memoir, fiction, and nonfiction writing that embrace liberation through noticing neglected and abandoned stories, and an inquiry into the nature of identity and where the self might exist.
The word ‘liberation’ comes from the French liberacion, the act of freeing or of being free, and from the Latin, līberātiō, the act of setting free, release, deliverance, acquittal, discharge, or release from debt. In this class, we will self-define liberation for our stories and discuss liberation as an act of reclamation and recovery, including freedom from restrictive socio-political and systemic conventions that would absent parts of our stories.
This is for you if you’d like to: Write a story or an essay; work on a newsletter, podcast, or reportage; reconfigure a piece of writing; write a novel or short story; write or think or be with others.
In four sessions we will create/re-create a narrative through four gateways. The form will focus on talks and generative writing that allow us places of entry and study to:
Cultivate curiosity about our writing and life.
Reclaim family and communal history by examining stories of political and social worlds, stories of class and power, stories of chosen and other-than-human family, stories outside of the binary, shadow stories, and so on.
Write the mystical stories and the mystery in our life/writing process.
Explore the philosophy evident and hidden in our stories.
As is usual in my classes, you can choose your own assignment rather than follow the ones that I provide. No one is obligated to share, and we create a container for the writer to share in the most supportive way for their work. There will be a small optional reading assignment for each class. The class will open and conclude with a sound ritual featuring our writing.
Two-hour class meetings will be held over video chat, using Zoom. Dates TBD.
Happy Holidays,
Sonya
You can find Sonya at~
The podcast I did with my kid.
One of the next newsletters may be on the art and theatre we experienced in London and the ways that a practice of being with an artist’s works can reshape a writing process.
My involvement with the WTO protest was primarily in support of those marching, and in ritual work throughout the city. I can see that it took many actions of people to make this a foundational effort that led later to the formation of the Occupy movement.
Favorite line: “The thing is, we went.” YES YOU DID! So proud of and inspired by you and your wandering/wondering. ❤️