Narratives

What we tell ourselves matters just as much as what we tell others. I could tell you that I haven’t posted—or even have attempted to write a Substack draft—because I was busy or say what people always say, “Oh, things have been crazy!” because they don’t know what else to say.

Life is crazy.

For everyone.

Especially now.

The fact is when it came to free time not working at a middle school in South Central Los Angeles, all I wanted to do was sip coffee on my balcony, listen to music and podcasts with my big, bulky headphones on, and tune out the world. I had zero energy for platform-building. I was navigating some pivots, plus the domestic and global messes we’re in thanks to narcissistic leadership. It’s chaotic out there. I’m sorry for all that people are enduring right now. I truly am.

Two years ago, I wasn’t that busy, had a ton of time on my hands, and at a very low point, I wrote an essay in which I begged Los Angeles to not let me down. I was struggling to find work, this man I was dating was proving to be a complete jerk in need of psychiatric care, and my novel had been rejected. I had moved out to Los Angeles in 2018 to get divorced, reinvent myself, not have seasonal winter depression, bike the beach in January, and be the woman I had always imagined myself being. I poured all of this heartbreak and hope into an essay that my amazing editor, Matthew Webb at Panorama, published in March 2024.

One year later, that essay won the Grand Prize Best Travel Story Of The Year Solas Award. One year after that, this essay is now part of an anthology available for pre-sale at Amazon and Bookshop, and will be released on June 9. The anthology’s editor, the very lovely Lavinia Spalding, wrote a fantastic Substack about this a few days ago detailing the story behind the stories (plus, a writing prompt!). My essay, initially published by Panorama, is titled “It Can Be Beautiful For Everyone,” and I’m super excited to say that it’s among quite a lineup: Roxane Gay, Susan Orlean, Ann Hood (who always knitted beautiful things when we were on the bus together in Cuba!), Marcia DeSanctis, and my dear friend and indefatigable globetrotter, Lisa VanderVeen.

Stories have their own journeys, how they happened, how they’re told, where they go, who reads them. I remain very, very surprised by the wings on this one essay and all the places it is going to. Someone in Amsterdam posted my essay on their Facebook. Again, stories have their own journeys.

This year marks 30 years of writing and publishing; 30 years of seeing my byline in newspapers or magazines or online, 30 years of watching my industry become almost unrecognizable, something I wrote about here last year. However, never in my 30-year career have I been in an anthology listed among authors I have admired for so long, women I would love to have a margarita with (and chips and guac) so that I could hear more about their travels—where they went and why, and how their restlessness for travel transforms them as it transforms me, though the irony of this anthology is that in this piece, I didn’t go anywhere. My first travel article was about London and was published by The Boston Globe in 2001. A full quarter of a century later, here, in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 13, I roam the enigmatic 405 and the beach 20 minutes from my apartment—apropro for an L.A. woman.

It’s strange to feel so blessed when there is so much suffering going on. Two years ago, when I wrote this essay and was in an extremely dark and somewhat scary funk, I imagined the world outside as this ongoing disco that I wasn’t invited to—bright and loud and vibrant, where everyone was always happy and resourced and dancing and having too much fun to worry about anything.

Of course, I was telling myself this fantasy to amplify my own disappointment. The human mind is a hall of mirrors.

It’s not hyperbole to say writing this essay helped pull me out of this funk—that, and telling myself to shower each day and at least try to step outside of the apartment. Small steps count. Sometimes, I did make it out of the apartment, just to feel the California sunshine on my face, and sometimes I didn’t because for whatever reason, I needed to sit inside my own darkness that day. Two years ago, despite my wandering thoughts, I definitely couldn’t have imagined this.

So imagine all of it, and see where it takes you. When I wrote this piece, I immediately heard it in second person before anything else, and I want to thank my intrepid editor, Matthew, for allowing me to go wide and weird with this. Creative freedom matters. I wrote “It Can Be Beautiful For Everyone” shortly after my agent at the time told me that my next manuscript should be in a single point-of-view and told in a more linear way. She’s a lovely person, but I always resented this feedback to write to market, to be more commercially viable, and so I wrote an essay that was anything but commercially viable and it is now in a book. Meanwhile, the multi-POV, non-linear novel I wrote in 2022-2023 that was under acquisitions review by a Big 5 imprint and then rejected by a sales team for being “too literary” now has a publisher. More to come later this year.

Gratitude is an understatement. Thank you, Lavinia. Thank you, Matthew and the Panorama team. Thank you Travelers’ Tales. Thank you, readers. Thank you new subscribers who discovered me from the recent New York Times profile on the amazing Sari Botton. Please consider pre-ordering The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 13, whether you live out of a suitcase or am an armchair traveler or anywhere in between.

There’s a saying that the world is round and the roads are curved so that we will never fully see what’s ahead. Let the journey surprise you, as it continues to do for me.

With love,
L.A. Woman
xo