“We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest.
We must learn to sail in high winds.”
~Aristotle Onassis
Yiasou!
Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer, editor, writing teacher, and speaker based in New York City.
She is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of "Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road.'"
You can email her at stephanie_701 {@} yahoo.com
The rent in New York is too darn high. Check out my #byteoutofthebigapple on the trend of living in shipping containers and my own personal dramedy of apartment hunting. Link in bio for Thomasnet.com article. What’s been your experience home hunting? Is it more “Selling Sunset,” “Tiny House Nation,” or “Fixer Upper”? Any hot real estate tips? 👀
I’m still basking in the afterglow of the Hobart Festival of Women Writers. I so desperately needed that time with writer friends, new and old, to rejuvenate me. Their words. Their hearts. Their brilliant minds.
💗
Nestled in the Catskill Mountains is a sleepy little book village called Hobart. It doesn’t have a police department or a department store to buy pantyhose, and come to think of it I don’t think there’s even a grocery store in town, but there are eight charming independent bookstores. Each autumn there’s a literary conference called the Festival of Women Writers, which brings in writers from New York City, Philly, Jersey City, and beyond.
Whenever someone asked me where I was from when I was growing up, I always responded with “Ten minutes from the GWB.” People knew the GWB meant the George Washington Bridge, but even people from New Jersey often had never heard of my small town, which wasn’t even a town but a borough. So that was part of the reason I used directions instead of an actual place name. The other reason was because that’s what my parents did. Neither of my parents were originally from that area. My father was an emigrant from Greece, and my mother was from the American Midwest. They met somewhere else entirely, and they moved to New York City when my mother was pregnant with me. It was only later that we as a family moved right over the bridge, to New Jersey. Even as I made my own memories participating in the public library’s reading challenge, exploring the woods, and watching the Fourth of July fireworks while lying on a blanket at a field near the school, the stories I grew up hearing were of the places my parents had come from or traveled to. I never felt like a local. The Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor said, “All writers are local somewhere.” What does it mean to be local somewhere? How does where we come from inform our identity—the idioms we use, our relationship to the land, our politics? How does our understanding of “home” change when we think of army families, refugees, and migrant workers? We’ll be exploring this topic more in my writing workshop at the Hobart Festival of Women Writers this weekend (link in bio if you’d like to join us), but I think in some ways we are all “local” on social media.
My writing nook. 📚
Twitter Updates
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- RT @MichaelHyatt: You don’t have to see the end from the beginning. All you have to see is the next step. 2 years ago
- RT @PSLiterary: “You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you ge… 2 years ago
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Stephanie Nikolopoulos 
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