Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech, Insisting so on difference, made me welcome.

– Philip Larkin, The Importance of Elsewhere

Reading silently, a kind of crossroads is formed. Your voice, on the page, becomes my voice, in my head. In reading, the mind is made separate from the mechanistic and perspicuous world, and a self is formed that is not precisely in or of that world. In reading, you experience that rarest loneliness, a loneliness that reminds you: you exist.

Stephen Metcalf

Book Research, by the Numbers

I recently travelled to Newfoundland to research resettlement communities—places the government moved between the 1950s and 1970s. I’d been studying people who chose to leave home for my book about modern nomads, mobility and alternative communities. Now I wanted to meet people who couldn’t bear to leave.

Boats in the harbour of the Fogo Island Co-op in Joe Batt's Arm, Newfoundland. I’m going through fifteen hours of interviews, thousands of words of notes, and a bunch of amateur pictures. More to come, but first a tallying up of numbers (alas, no Nicholas Felton treatment, I’m afraid): One generous research grant. 12 days 1,800 kilometres driven Two caribou and minke whales sighted (each) 70% rain, 20% wind, 10%fog 12 interviews with fishers Four islands visited Two boat trips Now … writing.

A tilting fishing stage where fish are stored in the community of Tilting, on Fogo Island, Newfoundland. This research was completed with assistance from Access Copyright Foundation, which supports publishers, writers and visual arts organisations through its grant programme.

This is What a Ghost Town Looks Like

The photo on the left is of Joseph and Elizabeth Hodder on their cod flakes in Ireland’s Eye, Newfoundland, circa 1950. The photo on the right is Llewellyn Toopes’ abandoned twine shop and house in 1989, more than twenty years after most people on Ireland’s Eye were relocated under the Newfoundland government’s resettlement program.

Source: Maritime History Museum’s “Resettlement Photos” collection.

You know there’s this kind of belief that you can’t go home. I was quite surprised to find out that you darn well can go home, for two reasons: my work is here, and I really love being here. I find that it’s just a nourishing place to be. And given the choice, this is where I’d rather be. And now I have a choice.––Zita Cobb, Fogo Island

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2013/01/29/back-to-the-future-in-fogo/

“It’s been hypothesized that ADHD might even be an advantage in certain change-rich environments. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that a brain receptor associated with ADHD is unusually common among certain nomads in Kenya, and that members who have the receptor are the best nourished in the group. It’s possible that we’re all evolving toward a new techno-cognitive nomadism, a rapidly shifting environment in which restlessness will be an advantage again. The deep focusers might even be hampered by having too much attention: Attention Surfeit Hypoactivity.” – Sam Anderson praises distraction in this 2009 piece for New York magazine.

In Praise of Distraction: "Techno-cognitive Nomads" and the Perks of ADHD

[Aram Bartholl’s clever art intervention, in Taipei]

The London Underground was quick to the mark when Apple recently brought out its new operating system for iPhones, iOS6. Seen on a noticeboard at Highbury & Islington Station: “For the benefit of passengers using Apple iOS 6, local...

Having just returned from France, where I travelled the Canal du Nivernais by barge—arriving home heavier than when I left, thanks to the nightly four-course meals—the waterways and sea are on my mind.

[A young seafaring nomad. Photograph by Bangkok-based freelance photographer Giorgio...

Warning: geek alert! More esoteric scribblings about Bruce Chatwin! [“In Search of Bigfoot (Ode to Thoreau),” by Tricia McKellar, for sale at Society 6.]

Are we born nomads? Are we meant to be restless? How does one tackle a chapter on that ocean called “community”? These are the sorts of...

As I get ready to tackle* a chapter for The Modern Nomad book that questions what that worn-out word “community” really means, I am draw to Engin Isin’s ideas about what migration does to one’s notion of citizenship. Isin is director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at...

[Zunn Taiga, Mongolia, 2007]

Maria Popova’s Brainpickings is always fascinating, but for the sake of productivity I try to occasionally shut down my computer and smell the English roses here in London. So I was glad my friend Allan Casey–author of the lovely book Lakeland–tipped me off...

[Adolf Konrad’s illustrated 1963 packing list from the exhibit “Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations.” Via The New York Times.]

I pack:

Passports (Canadian and European)

Photocopy of my citizenship papers (Britain)

Photocopy of my...

[Revellers at Wilderness Festival, via wildernessfestival.com]

As the London 2012 Olympics arrive in my ‘hood of Hackney, I’m reminded of something the British-born author Jonathan Raban once wrote in Granta: The English are “born into a casual phlegmatic acceptance of astounding...

Nomadic Art

[“Fall,” by Austrian artist Erwin Wunn] Not long ago, I travelled to Antwerp to research a story for a Canadian travel magazine. I met up wth Ria van Landeghem. Ria created something what she describes as a nomadic art exhibit, Error One. Every few months she gathers together artists from Belgium and elsewhere to present works on a particular theme (the last one was called “Into the Light”) at a different location in the city. Sometimes the exhibits are outside, sometimes they are at galleries. Each exhibit travels to a new location. The show I went to took place outside MuHKA, the contemporary art museum in the trendy neighbourhood of Zuid. Video art was projected on the wall of the museum and on various walls in an adjacent building. Error One side-steps the problem of securing expensive, long-term infrastructure for an art gallery, and it also mixes up the experience of seeing the art. Here’s an image from a previous exhibit that is a little, uh, off the wall. Note: Error One's next show happens in May and June, 2012. The theme is Lost & Found.

Lost & Found Towns

Veined with the thin red lines of highways, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the map of Newfoundland I hold in front of me has another notable feature: its jagged perimeter is marked by a rash of dots. Each denotes one of the hundreds of communities that were abandoned or relocated between the 1950s and 1970s, communities that have been disappeared by political will or isolation or by trying make a living in a remote outport where nature can sometimes work against you. [Photo via Fogo Island Arts Corporation] The map has a ghostly effect. Each dot represents an absence, a suggestion of people whose lives took much different trajectories than they intended. These modern exiles migrated to St. John’s or Corner Brook, or to the mainland. Some never returned; many carried with them a kind of grief for where they came from. Their towns disintegrated, were swallowed by the very landscape that surrounded them. In many places, the decaying foundations and broken down walls of a settlement is all that remains—the scaffolding of recent history. These populations came to be known by a cold, bureaucratic handle: Relocation Communities. In many cases, their stories were lost. There is one part of the province that does not have a dot beside it: Fogo Island. And it is there that a different narrative—about the attempt to reshape history and secure a future for at least one community—takes place. Fogo Island is a mere 25 kilometres long and 14 kilometres wide. To get there you fly to Gander, make your way north on Route 335 to the town of Farewell. From there you pick up a ferry toward the Change Islands and, finally, reach your destination. Fogo fought relocation during the 1950s and 1960s and became a case study for resilience when a documentary filmmaker interviewed locals for a National Film Board film. But over the years cod stocks dwindled and residents have struggled to make a living. Today many continue to scrape by. It is the quintessential Newfoundland outport village. Yet what makes the community different is how a group of industrious residents are trying to reshape its past and secure its future by revitalizing the island. They are headed by Zita Cobb, a wealthy, charismatic Fogo Islander. Cobb made millions in the energy industry and has returned to lead several ambitious, long-term projects. She’s created an arts organization and a high-profile artists’ colony (designed by Newfoundland-born, Norway-based architect Todd Saunders), is building a 29-room inn with a library, gallery and cinema to shows National Film Board films, and has established a micro-financing program for local residents to start small businesses. Cobb has said that the money from these ventures will be reinvested into the community. [You can see some of the studios that Saunders described in this story from Azure.] * I’ve seen similar community organizing in other parts of Canada. Young patriotic Edmontonians are forming community organizations to plan their neighbourhoods. This in a city with its own board game called Leaving Edmonton, which was inspired by the exodus of its talent (Adam Waldron-Blain, the artist who created the game, has since left Edmonton for Glasgow). Regular citizens in oil-rich Calgary—a city known for attracting transient groups of people who want to tap into its prosperity—have formed Civic Camp YYC to shape its urban future. In Portland, Oregon, I hung out with grassroots organizers of City Repair who held “intersection repairs” to beautify their neighhourhoods (while making them safer). [You can read more about what’s happening in Calgary and Portland in my story, “The DIY City,” for enRoute.] With Fogo Island, the question for skeptics might be whether a place can truly preserve its sense of self. Will it simply live on tourism and the vapours of history? Fogo Islanders would say no. Will it be a replication of the idea of “Newfoundland,” rather than a stronger, though perhaps nebulous, real Newfoundland? Or, instead, will it create that nebulous thing—the sustainable community—in a province with a history of displacement and poverty? The dialectic between Relocation Communities and Fogo Islanders represents a broader story. We live in an age of mobility, yet where we are from is built into our DNA. Each of us is born with, as the poet Karen Solie puts it, “a primary place.” It may explain why, when the tiny community of Beach, Newfoundland, recently faced evacuation after its roads were flooded, one resident told a reporter: “I am not going to leave and that’s it. I was born here and I’ll drown here.”

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image. -- Joan Didion