Barbara Sjoholm‘s memoir in essays, Incognito Street: How Travel Made Me a Writer, Seal Press, 2006, evokes a 1970s-style Bohemian travel life and will arouse memories in many readers. Those who knew they wanted to write when they were young will remember the way they looked at the world, what they saw and felt. And those who are just coming to writing will be enthralled with Sjoholm’s descriptions of what makes the writer inside her tick. But whether we were traveling in Europe or raising families in Kansas in our early twenties, the aspiring writers among us were certainly soaking up environments and pondering confusions and longings, all the stuff of poems, stories, and essays.

Reading Sjoholm’s honest account of her meandering way of finding her art will remind many of us about the way we understand who we wanted to become even if we had no idea of how to get to be that person. Reading Incognito Street, we will recognize our own connections to literature, to feeling different, to feeling unfinished.

Sjoholm remembers telling people when she was eight that she would be a writer. Summers, she spent time at her grandmother’s house in Battle Creek, Michigan. The summer she was 14, she believed that if she read all of War and Peace, she would “understand everything there was to know about living.” But when she “couldn’t make it through the first chapter, so packed with Russian names,” she was happy finding Dickens’ books. Her grandmother often commanded, “Go to the library!” and the young Sjoholm enjoyed the “slow, hot walk down Church Street, over the river, to Willard Library.” Her mother had died that year, and she remembers turning to literature because she needed a different world to live in. Reading Dickens at school and then at her grandmother’s and at the library, she “took heart in how the downtrodden eventually triumphed over those who oppressed them” in Dickens’ stories. She believed that reading the novels, she was “in a London so real it was as if I walked with Little Dorrit across the bridge to the Marchelsea to visit her father in debtor’s prison, as I followed the closemouthed solicitor Mr. Tulkinghorn through eerie gas lit lanes in search of Mr. Krook’s rag-and-bottle shop. ”

That summer, when Sjoholm told her grandmother that in addition to becoming a writer, she wanted to travel all of Europe, her grandmother’s reply surprised her. “Well, why shouldn’t you go to Europe?” she said. “You are certainly strong-willed enough to make your way in the world.” She then told Sjoholm about her own curiosities and travels, her time working with the Navajo in Arizona. And then she asserted, “Only time will tell if you have any talent as a writer. Talent is nothing without persistence.”

In December of 1970, a few years after graduating high school, Sjoholm uses funds her grandmother left her as an inheritance and leaves for Europe. She goes to London first and walks the city streets, writing down what she sees while editing out the fish-and-chip shops, launderettes, Chinese restaurants, and girlie shows that don’t seem Dickensian to her. Her journal contained phrases, she reports, that she thought would help her conjure London when in the future she set a story there: “White wigs like poodles at courtroom of Old Bailey,” Coal soot blackens the brick. Smell of coal, slightly sweet,” “The Thames and its bridges, a harsh sleety wind makes me hang on to my hat.”

Leaving London for Paris, Sjoholm meets American expatriate writers. Everyone seems to be writing novels. When one young man describes his novel as being “very New York,” Sjoholm seizes the opportunity to play the game, offering that she, too, is writing a novel. Thinking fast, she describes it is as being about a Hollywood stand-in. “It’s sort of Dostoyevskian,” she says, “you know, the theme of the double.”

Another man she meets asks what she is doing in Paris, and she says, “I’m traveling to educate myself, about art, about life.” When he asks if she is a writer, she is happy to say, “Yes.” He turns out to be an already published novelist, and everything he says to Sjoholm that afternoon is glamorous.

 Having hoped a friend, Laura, would join her in Europe, Sjoholm is happy to learn that she will be able to meet her in Barcelona. There before her friend, Sjoholm discovers the work of architect Antoni Gaudi and writes to Laura, “from the outside, breathlessly investigating [her] existence”:

I sit here at the Parque Guell, created by that made master of mosai, Gaudi. I can’t really describe it; it’s like a surreal Disneyland, a if Disneyland had been covered by a mud slide. …In Paris I thought that when I got to Spain I’d begin writing fiction; but I now understand a few things about writing I didn’t before. One, you can’t force it. Two, living is more important for a writer, at least at the beginning. If I sat in my room writing a novel, I wouldn’t be experiencing Barcelona. It’s a choice I make…

Thinking about herself writing about that landscape, the older Sjoholm remarks that although she didn’t yet know how to write what she saw, she was committing the city to memory as she had London and Paris. She didn’t yet know how to construct a plot or describe characters in evocative ways, but she loved Laura, and she wanted to evoke her spirit and personality on the page. Sjoholm is disappointed when she attempts this while she awaits Laura’s arrival because her descriptions and transcriptions of remembered conversations seem “unromantic and wooden.”

But what is clear in her heart is that she no longer wants to return to her actor boyfriend Rob, who she left behind after his continuingly unfaithful behavior. In letters, he pleads with her to return to be his muse, but she writes that Laura will be arriving and she must be in Barcelona for their trip. She wants the possibility of turning her trip with Laura into a piece of fiction.

While she waits for Laura’s arrival, Sjoholm goes with new friends to see a film about George Sand’s life in Majorca. After the film, Sjoholm starts writing in another of the many notebooks she buys in the cities she visits. She feels “happiness, elation and promise,” not “the yearning and despair” that was in her love for Rob.

Sjoholm remembers reading Laura a passage from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex:

Among women artists and writers there are many lesbians. The point is not that their sexual peculiarity is the source of the creative energy or that it indicates the existence of this superior type of energy; it is rather, that being absorbed in serious work, they do not propose to waste time in playing a feminine role or in struggling. Not admitting male superiority, they do not wish to make a pretense of recognizing it or to early themselves in contesting it.

She realizes that what seemed like laziness to her grandmother and even to herself, was rather “a sort of anxious indolence.” She longs to be absorbed in serious work of her own, not just “a homeless waif at the beck and call of Rob.” When Laura arrives and they are travel, Sjoholm realizes one night that she is “busy with the project I’d begun in my teens: hiding my story, reinventing myself.”

The essays in Incognito Street (the name of a street in Norway where she also visits and works) continue with vivid descriptions of time spent with friends and lovers, letters to the trust manager Sjoholm’s grandmother appointed to handle a small inheritance for her granddaughter’s education and hours alone writing and witnessing a growing sense of self.

After a disturbing climactic relationship in her travels, Sjoholm returns to the States. She retraces some steps in Michigan and then goes onto Seattle. She soon realizes:

…starting a small press would be the action, the thing bigger than myself that I’d been longing for. That printing books would give me a place to put my energy and a way, along with writing, to be part of the conversation about women’s literature and women’s changing roles in society. I didn’t know how that would happen, until I moved to Seattle and met Rachel da Silva at a party two years later. I was studying commercial printing at Seattle Central Community College, and Rachel, who worked as a printer, had just bought a Chandler & Price printing press. By the end of 1976 Seal Press had its first book, a letterpress poetry chapbook that we typeset and printed by hand.

The first thing that Sjoholm handset and printed herself was a broadside with a quote from Kafka: “A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” Sjoholm would ultimately write many such strong works as well as translate many more while running what would become an influential publishing house. Her memoirs Blue Windows (written under the name Barbara Wilson) and Incognito Street are among those that most move me.

Reading the story of her growing up and maturation into a writer, I identify with the combination of drive and desire to abandon oneself to one’s surroundings, the need to assess one’s safety in the world and yet to let go and live, the idea that to write one must be selfish and then once having written, must offer the writing as a gift to others.

“Thank you, Barbara Sjoholm,” I kept thinking while I was reading. “I feel like I was with you, even though I was somewhere else entirely. Every street I walk with you in Europe takes me back to the apartment I actually rented in Highland Park, New Jersey. Reading your story, I remember a time (one that now seems marvelous) of not knowing, of anguishing, of wanting to know, and of stumbling over so much I took into myself. Not Jung, but “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” not Anaïs Nin, but Robert Coover. Not Dickens but a poet named Robert Francis.”

Sjoholm’s book made me vividly remember myself in my twenties. Married, having babies, and directing a day care center, rather than traveling alone in Europe, I was avoiding remembering the poetry books that seemed to fall into my hands when I browsed bookstores during college. I didn’t yet let myself connect my love of these poetry collections to my yearnings as an adolescent to write books, or to the few poems I scribbled while I was in junior high and high school, or to the way I always believed there was great truth in novels, though my folks reminded me constantly that they were fiction. Oh, how reading about Sjoholm’s months in Europe, I reconnected with the day in 1976 when I decided I had to write or else I couldn’t be me.

As a reader, a writer, and a contemporary, I rejoice in Barbara Sjoholm’s company, and relive what it feels like to hide oneself, to reinvent oneself, and to find out that the invention is the very person one longed to become, the one actually already there waiting to breathe.

Here is a writing exercise inspired by Sjoholm’s story. It has a long set up as I excerpt from In Cognito Street and then suggest a way we can use a particular thought process to help us write:

Writing in Your Own Defense
During Sjoholm’s stay in Norway, she hiked glaciers, where she thought about her friendships and about her desire to become a writer, her strides in that direction.

Ruthie, one of her friends from California, had written her a bossy letter:

You say you’re living alone and reading Proust and Jung and working in a discount store. That you’re taking a bookbinding course, because you “want to somehow, someday make books.” Somehow, Someday. That about sums up your life. And it’s not good enough! Don’t you realize, that you’re never going to become a writer like this? You can do so much more with your life.”

Sometimes napping on the glaciers during summer hikes, Sjoholm continued in her dreams to argue with Ruthie, using Thoreau, who she was newly reading, for support:

that “inspector of snowstorms,” was on my side in the argument, telling me there was a value in simply being in the world and noticing it closely ….the world was calling to me with its rivers and glaciers and fields of wildflowers.”

Tossing the idea of productivity and achievement out the window for the time being and believing that no one can tell another just how to become an artist, Sjoholm dedicates herself to keeping a journal as Thoreau did. “My journal should be the record of my love,” she quotes him. “I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love to think of.”

Sjoholm sets herself the task in her writing of giving a sense of the natural world and showing affection for it. Sjoholm describes bike riding in the mountains at the end of summer just before the hotel she is working in will close for the season:

That day at the very end of August it rained. I took refuge with my bike in a barn, with an old man whose dialect was so strong I hardly understood him. It didn’t matter; he gave me some cheese and I gave him some chocolate, and when the sun came out we both smiled to see there was a rainbow. When I got to the highest peak, I took a deep breath and started to fly downhill. It was a five-kilometer stretch of joy, where green and gold rushed around me like a tunnel I could sense but not touch; the mountains were all around me, and the sound of the river was loud as always, but so familiar I no longer heard it as anything but the rush of my own heart.

Now, it’s your turn to affirm that you can rely on the way you see the world. I’ve broken the process into four steps:

1) Think of someone with whom you disagreed about how you were going to do something that was important to you.

2) Write down the words they said that stay with you, that made you feel angry, that you want to refute. Put their dialog in quotes at the top of a page.

3) Find some time for solitude–even if it is only in your car at a park or by a window at a café. Describe where you are and what it looks and sounds and smells like. Now associate to a time when you experienced exhilaration. Remember where you stood or sat or rode at that time. Describe the world as you saw it, smelled it, touched it (or you it), heard and tasted it.

4) Imagine that this will become a letter to the person whose words you are refuting–an unmailed letter. Where will you keep it instead of mailing it? Why? Write about this.

Chances are that you have written your way toward what you believe is truest about your efforts. Chances are that you can expand this piece into a longer one about your life.

For an in-depth interview with Barbara Sjoholm, visit Gadling’s The Traveler’s Weblog.