By Genni Gunn
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| Genni Gunn: writer and world traveler. |
My new book is a departure from my other work, in that
it is creative nonfiction – a combination of travel/memoir. I have been
travelling all my life, and have rows upon rows of travel journals.
While I have used many of my travels as the backdrop to short stories or
novels, I felt compelled to write about some of those journeys as my
experiences, without the filter of fictional drama.
As I
accumulated these stories, I began to think about my fascination with
travel, with movement, and while sorting through the mass of stories to
include in
Tracks, I began to realize how much my childhood experiences
have shaped my wanderlust.
When I think of travel, I don’t think
of destinations, I think of movement, of assuaging restlessness, of
being rootless, as immigrants are, always reaching for that elusive
imagined home, like trying to catch a mirage on a hot desert highway,
the illusion shimmering and enticing.
Travel for me is a
comfortable state, a detachment from the trappings of a physical place.
It’s the motion I crave, the to-and-fro, taking flight and landing,
going to cities or countries, towards new landscapes and emotional
terrains, because when one travels, the unknown awaits to be discovered —
about one’s self, about others, about one’s relationship to time and
place.
Sometimes, I travel to explore new landscapes, the sea,
the sky, the natural world a perfect metaphor for memory, for
(e)motions, for relationships, for all that is in endless motion and
change. Nature is organic and as close to perfect in its properties as
anything could be. In the intricate design of a leaf or a tree trunk is
art and architecture, texture and colour; in any living thing is the
constant metamorphosing, the visible stages of birth, life and death,
evident within a moment, or a season, or a month or a year. All life, a
three-stage play of beginning, middle and end. I leave home, I travel, I
return.
And if I stay away long enough, on my return, home
reappears slightly altered, discordant, a melody played in the wrong
key. For a while, I feel unsettled — the city louder, greyer, the people
strange. I long for solitude and open spaces, recreating myself
elsewhere in memory, until slowly I settle into the busyness of my city
life.
Sometimes I travel to enter a state of alienation — not as
flights to and from anything, nor as quests, but as journeys into the
unexpected, through which even the ordinary becomes extraordinary, as if
an opaque film has been removed from my eyes, rendering my vision more
acute. In Sittwe, outside my window, a tree heavy with hanging fruit
bats appears miraculous, as if it had borne the breathing creatures that
cling to its branches until dark; scarlet lava flowing into the sea in a
thunderhead of vapour in Hawaii is a sharp reminder of the earth’s
fearsome power. In the hills of Myanmar, I jump to safety when water
buffalo approach, then realize they are afraid of me. Nothing is what it
seems, my perceptions in continual flux. Motion is my aphrodisiac: the
possibility of discovery versus the claustrophobia of continuity. The
unknown, a constant attraction/distraction.
Because my sister was
living in Myanmar, my travels there in the years before the election
were not only an opportunity to reconnect with her, but also to visit a
country closed to the outside world for decades, to glimpse the evolving
political landscape and the effects of events that led up to the
election of 2010. These were journeys into the foreign, into
uncertainty, into mystery — the antithesis of our media-saturated,
technological, reality-TV, public artifice. In Myanmar, my sister and I
remembered our child selves, and recounted who we were, mixing and
matching our memories, as if to rediscover each other.
To Italy, I
travel often, because Italy, for me, is a return to the echoes of
childhood — both familiar and foreign — a mythical home: a ghost town I
populate with the memories of those who knew me then, their version of
me more palpable than my version of myself. Each return leads me to a
slightly altered place, a fata morgana of hilltop towns and cliffs
toppling into the sea, of experiences distorted and magnified, unlike
the ones fixed inside the snow-globe of memory.
Genni Gunn is an author, musician, and translator. See her read from Tracks
at the Thin Air "Forewords" event, and compete in the Haiku Deathmatch on Saturday, September 21 at the Free Press Cafe.
