Artists have known for millennia that travel can kindle creativity. Da Vinci traveled across Renaissance Italy and France. Mozart's father took him all over Europe as a child, exposing him to different ways of thinking and living. Writers have left home and gone to new lands to experience that sense of strangeness, what the French call depaysement: the feeling of being out of one's familiar country. It gives us heightened awareness and fuels our creativity.
Before I bought a one-way ticket to Paris (one of the most thrilling things I've ever done), I was also understandably nervous about living abroad for a year or more. But I thought, "Well, it's a Western country, it won't be too different than here."
Well, everything was different: the attitudes toward life, work, and family; the proportions of the houses; the paving on the streets; the types of trees along the roads; the design of pots and pans; even the color of the plastic wrap -- light green.
It was a little scary to have my senses flooded with new sights, smells, tastes to adjust to for a long-term expat life in Paris. It was also tremendously exhilarating, and on that wave of joy (and homesickness), I wrote The Paris Writers Circle.
This past year, I visited friends in Paris and Cagnes-sur-Mer, between Cannes and Nice, where Renoir had his final home and studio. As long as I was across the pond, I made the most of it by also stopping by Dublin on my way back to the States.
I gathered inspiration for my creativity from many scenes in Dublin, which I'm sharing below. More Dublin scenes can be enjoyed in this blog at this link.
Paris beauty here.
