“There is no month in the whole year in which nature wears a more beautiful appearance than in the month of August.”
~Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers
You may also be interested in how Jack Kerouac’s hometown inspired Dickens.
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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
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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. 📚
Home is a hidden world, and so it is a place of respite.
The beautiful thing about long friendships is knowing each other through various seasons of your life — through terrible statistics classes and fascinating American history courses, through changes in hair colors and changes in homes, through parents and spouses. My friends were visiting from out of town this weekend, and it was such a sweet opportunity to catch up in person after years of not seeing each other during the pandemic. Over a delicious dinner at @sodaclubnyc, we chatted about books and museums and how certain places become home.
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Stephanie Nikolopoulos 
love what you did with the pic! beautiful!!
and great quote!