June 2, 2010
This September I will travel to Vietnam where I’ll stay mostly in Hanoi, the country’s capital and artistic center. I’ve grown up hearing about Hanoi’s beauty, as the city of artists and poets, but I have only seen it in photographs. At twenty-eight, I’m interested in seeing how quickly my romantic notions of “the motherland” dissolve while I’m there, or perhaps, to see if they dissolve at all. At any rate, my writing can only benefit from the challenge. Although I will try to keep busy by taking language lessons and studying folk poetry and folk songs, my main goal is to continue the current rate at which I’ve been writing since the workshops began last September.