I’ve recently returned from a weeklong writing retreat in the south of France (more on that in a future post) led by my friend and fellow Amherst Writers & Artists facilitator Summer Hardinge. Yesterday I was looking through the notebook I kept while there, and I noticed a short piece that I wrote in response to a postcard. Summer had a collection of Van Gogh postcards, and each day on the retreat she invited one of the participants to draw one. She would then post it on the

To prepare for an upcoming writing retreat in France led by my friend Summer Hardinge, I decided to read Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. I had heard it was wonderful, but I didn’t expect such an erudite, subtle, witty, and philosophically wide-ranging treatment of the topic. Nor did I expect to delve deeply into a traveler’s way of seeing, which really is the same as a writer’s way of seeing. For example, here's what de Botton says about curiosity: Curiosity might be pic