“[O]ne’s life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality….”
~Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis
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I’m Soooooo Pretentious | Stephanie Nikolopoulos -
March 18, 2014
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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
Thank you all for your generous donations to help out the sled dogs at Snowdog! Some of you dropped comments in my original post and others of you privately messaged me to let me know you’re helping to provide food and pay for veterinary bills. You are amazing. Thank you. Getting to meet and play with these gorgeous dogs was one of the highlights of my adventures in Kiruna, Sweden. If you want to read more about it, check out my story “Letting Go of the Reins” in Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Making Me Time. (Link in bio).
Have you ever gone on a pilgrimage? When I was an English major at Scripps College in Southern California, I roadtripped up the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco, wondering at the wind turbines and inhaling the intoxicating aroma of Gilroy, and made a beeline for City Lights Bookstore, that iconic literary paradise that has its own press and has published all my favorite poets. I bought founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “San Francisco Poems,” a thin paperback I carried everywhere with me for the duration of the trip. I’d pull it out at various sites and read the poems aloud to my dear friend, who humored my dramatic flair for the arts. Years later, my sister met Lawrence Ferlinghetti and got him to sign a book for me. Then, when I began my first job in book publishing, my editor told me he had corresponded with Ferlinghetti back in the day. As the years passed on, I would take myself on solo trips to the art house theatre in New York City to watch the documentary “A Rebirth of Wonder,” in which the poet visited his ancestral land, and I would head to City Lights every chance I got to go to San Francisco. You can well imagine then the great loss I feel today upon learning of Ferlinghetti’s passing. At 101 years old, he seemed immortal, and I suppose he is: for all writers live on, touching people’s lives, through their words.
💕
Astrid Lindgren is one of my personal heroes. The Swedish author advocated for animal rights and children’s rights. Her freckle-faced, red-haired character Pippi Longstocking marched to the beat of her own drum, teaching me to live more boldly, more joyfully, and in pursuit of justice.
I am thrilled to finally get to share some exciting news with you! Chicken Soup for the Soul selected my personal essay “Letting Go of the Reins” for their new book “Making ‘Me Time,’” which just hit the shelves this week (link in bio). In my story, I explore about how I pushed myself to break out my comfort zone to travel solo to the Arctic Circle, to Kiruna in Sápmi (the Swedish Lapland), where I embarked on an incredible adventure with sled dogs. I don’t want to spoil the story, but let’s just say it was as much of an inward journey as an outward one.
Have you ever fallen in love with a place? Yearned for it? Ached for it? Felt most yourself when you were there? Have you ever kept returning to a place where everyone said you could do better elsewhere? Have you ever fallen for the way the taxis honk and the pedestrians yell and worried how you’d fare in silence? Have you ever wondered what it meant that you shared this place with so many people? Have you ever considered leaving but been unsure of how you’d possibly move on? Have you ever fallen hard for a place, idiosyncrasies and all?
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