About

I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since flown away into eternity. - from a letter of Franz Kafka to Max Brod

I grew up with the peculiar affliction of not quite feeling at home, of suspecting that somewhere, far away, there was the right place for me to be. I left at 17, and thought I wouldn’t look back.

But as the years passed, I began to notice that all my writing centered around the landscape of my youth, the houses and apartments I passed through, my family, their joys, and their struggles. It was as if I had wanted to leave just to write back — that by looking from a distance, I could begin to understand who I was, where I was from, and who I might become.

I continued to move. A lot. To the extent that any home of mine has either flown away into eternity, or has simply become a many-angled, many-layered thing. To the extent that there isn’t a central landscape in my writing anymore, no central home to which I write. But every place and person I have known has set a kind of anchor in me – none of them have ever quite left.

These are my letters home – to all the country sides, beaches, cities, and friends I have encountered along the way.

************

Simone Gorrindo is a traveling freelance writer, editor, and poet who bounces between her native San Francisco, New York City, and Annapolis, Maryland between trips. Her work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications, including Matador Abroad, Autograph Magazine, and Bay Weekly, the Chesapeake’s independent newspaper. She gains and loses language skills yearly, and longs to make it back to the rain forests of Indonesia. In her spare time, she writes music and searches out the last of the living who still read poetry.