Prompt 163. Planting Roots
Novelist Jennifer Steil on belonging nowhere
Hi friend,
I’m writing to you from Harbor Springs, Michigan, where I came to take part in a book festival. It’s a quaint little town on Lake Michigan, with grand summer cottages fronting the water and towering green trees, the tops of which are just starting to turn red, orange, and gold. My Isolation Journals comrade Carmen and I traveled up a few days early to do some work and a little adventuring with our dear pal Hollye Jacobs, whose “Day in the Life of My Dreams” prompt is a forever favorite. After a year and a half at home, it’s exciting to be on a work trip.
It’s such a contrast to this last year of staying home and putting down roots, which was actually a great novelty for me. After a life spent roaming and living out of suitcases, I’ve come to understand how important it is for me to have that anchor—how grounding it is to carve out my own little resting place, my own little abode.
This tension between the allure of the new and the comfort of the familiar is something that today’s prompt contributor, the novelist Jennifer Steil—whose peregrinations make my life look positively sedentary—has us consider. May her words inspire us to reflect on the tug and pull of home and away.
Sending love,
Suleika
P.S. I had the honor of going on beloved Hoda Kotb’s new podcast, Making Space. (Spoiler alert: My partner Jon Batiste made a cameo!) We went deep into what it’s like to be in a relationship while navigating a reckoning. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts—I’d love to hear what you think!
P.P.S. If you missed it, I strongly urge you to watch the replay of our Studio Visit with Jon. He offers so much wisdom about the art of failure and the crucial role it plays in success. I know I’m biased, but it was magic. Happy viewing!
Prompt 163. Novelty Junkie by Jennifer Steil
All my life, I’ve been drawn to novelty. I yearn to move into new spaces, to travel to new countries, to explore new neighborhoods. I walk different routes every day, perpetually crave something new for breakfast, prefer to buy groceries from shops I’ve never been to, and switch toothpaste and shampoo brands every month. Any kind of routine makes me want to crawl out of my skin.
For most of my twenties and thirties, I dreamed of living abroad, but couldn’t figure out how to do this while paying off monstrous student loans. Living abroad seemed to require family money or a rich benefactor. Finally in 2006, I was offered the chance to leave the United States to run a newspaper in Yemen. Yemen had not been in my plans, but Yemen would rescue me from returning to the same office every morning. Yemen was sure to shake up my life and offer me something new, something I had never imagined. How could I resist?
Yemen was utterly unlike anywhere I had ever been. Living there challenged all of my assumptions about the world and prompted me to examine how the US had shaped me. My work consumed me, my reporters taught me more than I taught them. I learned Arabic and made irreplaceable friends. Eventually, I also met my husband. His work as a diplomat allows us to move to a new country and learn new languages, cultures, and mythologies every few years. After four years in Yemen, we lived in Jordan, England, Bolivia, France. We’re now in Uzbekistan. Home for me is not a place, but simply Tim and our daughter Theadora.
Living in between, belonging nowhere, has been fertile for me and my work as a writer. Yet it has also nearly wrecked our lives. I live in a permanent state of nostalgia for people and places I love. My daughter is old enough to suffer when friends leave, or she does. I cannot always access the medical care I need. We have also endured the unthinkable: I’ve been kidnapped, my husband has been attacked by a suicide bomber, we’ve survived a catastrophic automobile accident. In 2020, because of the pandemic, the UK evacuated me and Theadora from Tashkent and kept us apart from Tim for nearly a year.
I wonder sometimes what I could find if I were to plant roots down instead of out. My joy has always been in movement, but maybe there is a joy to be had in stillness. Maybe someday I will find out.
Your prompt for the week:
If you had to stay in your home country forever, or leave and never return, which would you choose? Which do you value more: home and security, or novelty and adventure? Why do you think that is?
If you’d like, you can post your response in the comments below, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals.
Today’s contributor
Jennifer Steil is an award-winning author, journalist, and teacher currently living in Uzbekistan. Her most recent novel, Exile Music—which explores an overlooked slice of World War II history, following Jewish musicians who flee Vienna in 1939 to seek refuge in the Bolivian Andes—won the Grand Prize in the international Eyelands 2020 Book Awards and was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Lesbian Fiction Award, among others. Her previous novel, The Ambassador’s Wife, won the 2013 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Best Novel award and the 2016 Phillip McMath Post Publication book award. Her first book, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, is a critically lauded memoir about running a newspaper in Yemen.
If you missed our Studio Visit with the inimitable Jon Batiste on the art of failure, you can find it in our archive of past Studio Visits, along with my conversations with gorgeous humans like Elizabeth Gilbert, Jedidiah Jenkins, and Ashley C. Ford.
I have come to believe that to know myself deeply. I need to know the place where I stand.
Where I “stand”, where I call home, is not just about a roof, four walls, and a plot of dirt; it is the basis for who I am. Although the structure helps inform where and how I spend my days, and where I raise and gather my family, it is also where I build my sense of place—it is my familiar foundation and my footing.
As a gardener and steward of my soil, I’ve come to realize the concept of perennial life through my planting practice, always amazed each spring to see the return of decades old day lilies my great-grandmother first planted on my generational farm, or the Bearded-Iris bulbs return-- the dozens her mother entrusted to her, packed in a valise from abroad as an immigrant.
The story of my perennials, my farm, my place, is a part of a long legacy where my roots have been allowed to spread wide and deep and long. My love of nature and gardening is persistent, and when I look back, I realize my love of being rooted informs me of who I am.
My home hasn’t been found among the humans who I share DNA and those who you raised me. My home has never been made out of wood and glass from any childhood homes I’ve lived in. My home isn’t in any fleeting memories or experienced Ive been a part of, whether pleasant or not. My home isn’t even found being around nature that I have always admired and adored. Instead, I prefer to define my home as coming back to the higher source deep within myself. The constant and always, my place of comfort. Connected to a world beyond that is revealed in due time. My Protector, the originator who formed not only my limbs, but already knew most everything about me. While I am one who craves change and newness, this heartfelt space within has been, is and will forever be regardless of where I am in space and time. My home is mysterious, an enigma. My home is full of so much love it moves me without me having to move anywhere.