Book Passage 2015: Notes on teaching, touchstones, and the crossing of thresholds.

“The threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.”

—John O’Donohue

It’s a Saturday afternoon in Corte Madera, California—a town just about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco and home to a beautiful bookstore called Book Passage.

I’m sitting on the red brick piazza that encircles Book Passage, which is surrounded by other establishments such as a yoga studio, cake supply shop (named Nothing Bundt Cakes, no less), and a restaurant home to the world’s best mac ‘n’ cheese, but Book Passage stands out, a spiritual anchor grounding this strip of stores. It is August 2012.

The sun shines strong overhead, a light breeze blows, and across from me sits someone I have considered a hero for nearly three years, ever since I learned about travel writing. His name is Don George, and I first discovered Don’s book, The Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Writing, on a layover in Sydney’s airport. I was living in New Zealand at the time, and had just spent three weeks in Thailand. I received an email my final day in Bangkok, letting me know I’d been accepted to a Masters in Travel Writing course in London.

On my way back to New Zealand, on that fateful stopover in Sydney, I wandered into a massive Lonely Planet store. Not one to typically use a guidebook when I travel (for better and for worse, of course), I found my way to the back of the store, to a section devoted to travel narratives. And it was there that I noticed Don’s guide on a shelf.

“I’m going to be a travel writer,” I said to myself, holding the guide in my hands for the first time. “I need this book.”

I swiftly devoured the guide, along with another anthology I’d bought called The Best of Lonely Planet Travel Writing, and in the months and years to come, proceeded to follow Don’s writing in various places across the web and literary world. He wrote often of serendipity, of being open to the chance encounters that can change and shape us in a new place, and he soon became the paragon of who I aspired to be as a writer.

To now be sitting across from him, on the third afternoon of the Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference, is a happening I can’t quite wrap my mind around. It’s my first time at the conference, which Don himself founded in 1991, and finally meeting and connecting with him in person has been nothing short of surreal.

And perhaps it is precisely because of how surreal it all is that I feel more emboldened than normal and comfortable enough to ask Don two questions:

Was it okay to ask why he didn’t have a website of his own?

And were there any longer book-length projects he still wanted to bring to fruition?

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Don replies, telling me about his dream of publishing an anthology of his own stories.

My impetuousness continues as I ask what steps such a project might involve, and then offer to help make that happen. By the time the conference ends, I can feel that deep roots have found room to grow in our friendship.

By the time the conference ends, Book Passage feels like home.

* * *

Book Passage has since become a kind of touchstone place for me. Every year has looked remarkably different, and yet the middle of August has always found me in the same place—back in Corte Madera, back on the brick piazza of the bookstore, back in the place that first enabled me to connect with my heroes.

The conference is a touchstone I keep returning to, and yet each year finds us all moving forward in our lives and work as well.

In 2013, we launched Don’s new website on the first day of the conference, which he and I had spent a couple of weeks that summer creating. There was champagne to mark the occasion, and a wonderful group of friends to help us celebrate.

In 2014, again on the first day of the conference and back on the bookstore’s brick piazza, Don announced he would be creating an anthology of his own stories from forty years as a travel writer, which would be called The Way of Wanderlust.

There to make the announcement with him was Larry Habegger, co-founder of the publishing company Travelers’ Tales, who announced he would be publishing Don’s book. That moment kicked off a year of what I believe I will always consider one of the most rewarding partnerships of my life—getting to work with Don and Larry to bring The Way of Wanderlust into the world.

And naturally, there was more champagne to celebrate…

And this year in 2015, the conference marked the release of The Way of Wanderlust.

This alone would have been thrilling enough for me—especially as I’d had the honor of illustrating the book’s cover and creating several hand-drawn maps for its interior—but after attending the conference three times as a student, I had the additional honor of returning this year as a member of the faculty.

At least half the people I crossed paths with this weekend were forced to listen to me talk about a book called The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship, written by a British poet, author, and lecturer named David Whyte—and if you’re reading this post, chances are it’ll resonate with you as well.

He writes often throughout the book about thresholds, and the following passage in particular is one that stood out to me earlier this summer:

“Beginning a courtship with a work, like beginning a courtship with a love, demands a fierce attention to understand what it is we belong to in the world. But to start the difficult path to what we want, we also have to be serious about what we want.

“Following this path through increasing levels of seriousness, we reach a certain threshold where our freedom to choose seems to disappear and is replaced by an understanding that we were made for the world in a very particular way and that this way of being is at bottom nonnegotiable. Like the mountain or the sky, it just is. It is as if we choose and choose until there is actually no choice at all. When the level of attention reaches a certain intensity…then the person who has been looking suddenly feels as if he or she has been sought out by the world, sought out, acknowledged, named and recognized. The only question is whether you will respond, whether you will not turn away, whether you will turn toward it—whether, in effect, you will become a dedicated spirit.”

I love that there are multiple definitions to the word threshold. I love that it can be a strip of wood or stone “forming the bottom of a doorway and crossed in entering a house or room,” but that it is also “a point of entry or beginning.”

I especially love that a threshold is “the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested.”

For me, this weekend at Book Passage met every definition of what a threshold is. It was a chance to again return home to a place that has become increasingly sacred in my life.

It was the beginning of what I hope will be many more opportunities to teach and share what I love about travel writing with others.

And the utter intensity of it all—the deep conversations and connections that took place at all hours from early morning breakfasts to 3am, over coffee and white wine and karaoke—put us all in a place where the inspiration that Book Passage provides could take root and effect real change in our lives.

* * *

Perhaps the greatest challenge of this weekend—even beyond teaching for the first time and a minor case of sleep deprivation—was simply not having the time for photos.

There were so many pivotal moments from the conference that my camera just wasn’t brought out to capture. There was co-teaching a three-day workshop on writing for the web with Pam Mandel, a writer I have long admired and was honored to have the opportunity to teach with; and there was the amazing group of ten students we had the honor of meeting with each morning.

There were afternoon panel sessions and mini-writing workshops, which I appeared on as a faculty member but still felt I had so much to learn from those I was there with; I often kept a black notebook on my lap during each session, in which I would sneakily scribble a choice line or two as my fellow panel members spoke.

And there was an extraordinary on-stage conversation between Don and the novelist Isabel Allende, which took place on the final afternoon of the conference. For the first time all weekend, I sprawled out on the floor in the back of the event room, opened my notebook wide across my lap, and soaked up the wisdom that Isabel shared with the room—about the gifts of storytelling, about the need for inner roots, and a beautiful line about, “Home is where love is.”

But gratefully, my camera does hold a few photos from this weekend, ones that I will always look to as representatives of the wider magic that took place in Corte Madera.

There is a photo with my new friend Julianne, who flew from Sydney to San Francisco specifically for the conference. We had exchanged a few emails during the summer, talking about Book Passage and the benefits I believe it offers, and it was a wonderful full-circle moment for me to then spend the weekend with her in my morning workshop.

There is my lovely friend Anna Elkins winning first prize in the conference-wide writing contest, her story “From Morocco, With Love” bringing me to tears as she journeyed from the streets of Paris to the dunes of the Sahara at dawn.

There are copies of The Way of Wanderlust, and a photo of Don and Larry and me, echoing our shot from last summer after announcing the book.

And there is even my own humble book, nestled between titles from my heroes.

There are photos of a little five-month-old boy named Ellis, the beautiful son of my friend and editor Lavinia Spalding and her husband Dan.

As I thought about it last night while editing these photos, it occurred to me that though we were in a bookstore, surrounded by shelf after shelf of the sacred objects I most aspire to create in my vocation, what I love about these photos are that books are merely the backdrop for the greater gifts of life. For a baby sleeping against his mother; staring into the eyes of his dad; crinkling his brow as Don George holds him.

It’s part of a larger lesson I’ve been learning lately—that my professional dreams are but a part of the dreams I have for myself and my life; that friendships and family will always be at the center, and everything else the manifestation of those relationships.

But the photo I think I’ll treasure most from this weekend was captured just after the conference ended. I’m sitting shotgun in the car of my dear friend Colette; in the backseat are Anne, Anna, and Gabi, three other fellow female writers, all of us in our late 20s and 30s. We move through heavy traffic across the Golden Gate Bridge, the skyline of the city a hazy blue on the horizon. Wind whips through our hair.

We recap the weekend; we share story ideas and discuss potential outlets for them; we plot adventures that’ll have all our paths crossing again soon. I can feel us all on the brink, on journeys begun long ago, but leaving Corte Madera with a visceral sense of beginning, renewal, and joy coursing through us. Our vocations are a vast expanse of possibility stretching out before us, and it’s emboldening to know we’ll be there for each other along the way.

It’s this sense of friendship and camaraderie I’ll remember most from our Golden Gate drive, as I recently made the decision to spend the fall in San Francisco. After stalking Craigslist for a week, I found a studio apartment to sublet for four months, specifically to position myself in the community I’ve met here.

I’m grateful to have connected with so many writers and artists in San Francisco, who have inspired me to return to the city nine times in the past three years, but I’ve never stuck around long enough to become a part of that community on a day-to-day level. An analogy occurred to me last week, as I celebrated the birthday of another dear friend in the Bay Area—that it was as though I had built a house but not yet begun to live in it.

As Isabel Allende herself said at the conference, the love I have for my vocation, and the love I’ve found for my friends through that vocation, has come to feel like more of a home than I could ever hope to find in four walls and a foundation anywhere else. I’m still not sure what life will look like after my sublet ends, but for these next four months at least, I couldn’t be more grateful and excited to be here, and our Golden Gate drive yesterday afternoon was a perfect encapsulation of my gratitude.

Finally, after traffic let up and we were back in the city, we dropped Anne off at her apartment and Anna caught a taxi to the airport. Colette and Gabi then dropped me at the corner by my new studio, and I crossed my final threshold of the weekend.

The threshold that leads me home.

* * *

To everyone who helps make Book Passage magic possible—from conference co-chairs Don George and Bob Holmes, to Book Passage staff, especially Kathryn, Karen, and Dana, to faculty and students—thank you for yet another extraordinary year in Corte Madera.

Here’s to BP 2016!