What I really sought was a better-marked trail of my parents’ intellectual lives: bound and printed evidence of what they’d read, what had inspired and shaped their minds. A connection, via books, between them and me. But my parents did not read to me or tell me stories; my father did not read any fiction, and the stories my mother may have loved as a young girl in Calcutta were not passed down. My first experience of hearing stories aloud occurred the only time I met my maternal grandfather, when I was two, during my first visit to India. He would lie back on a bed and prop me up on his chest and invent things to tell me. I am told that the two of us stayed up long after everyone else had gone to sleep, and that my grandfather kept extending these stories, because I insisted that they not end. [June 13 & 20, 2011, pp. 78-9]

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Following her graduate, Maia spent several months in Patagonia as the recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship for travel related to her creative writing. She blogged periodically about her trip; a November 2009 excerpt from her travel blog:

Tierra del Fugeo is a land of peat bogs, swamps, vista, lichen, and crumble. It’s haunting and peaceful, inhabitated by beaver and bird. It’s easy to feel lonely here, even when other people are around. Coloane’s stories are beginning to come to life for me in an entirely new way. In Boston I struggled to understand his often bleak views of nature, but here, I sense its motives. This land is dramatic, derelict, huge and empty. Some moments it seems the best a person can hope for is a companion and hot mate. But then I touch the bark of the nothofagus. It feels dry, a clear sensation. There’s something magic here, surely.

More about Maia’s experience, and about the Fellowship program, can be read at http://blogs.bu.edu/world.