Follow the notebook.

Why I moved back to Paris

NB: Hello all, I’ve been publishing this photography / writing / drawing Substack notebook for a bit over a year now and I’d like to ask what you’d like to see more of, less of, etc. If there’s any way it can be useful to you, please let me know in a DM. Thanks~! And thanks for reading! Your comments are always a thrill.

Why I moved back to Paris.

(It wasn’t for the weather.)

…[T]he root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. ~James Baldwin

I’m working on a book project, Je suis le carnet, a walking / drawing / photography notebook that charts how the city is changing with the construction and conception of Greater Paris. On an urban planning level, there are expansions of train and metro lines, connecting suburbs to each other that used to only be accessible via train by going into Central Paris and out again.

Eco-quartier Les Docks de St Ouen

Often, green space is prioritized and habitats for birds and other wildlife is woven into the structure and plans for the new areas. There is also a lot of speculation in real estate and a construction and renovation boom. I’m asking questions about migration and language and perception and H/history. Everything that happens in the world resounds in Paris, as if the city were a bell.

I’ll send updates on the project from time to time.

I arrived in Paris on October 27th and spent November 5th election night at an event organized by Ivy Writers, created 20+ years ago by my friends Jen Dick and Michelle Noteboom. With this group of 30 or so writers and artists, I read poems and showed my photographs from the 2020 election. It was good to not be alone, refreshing news websites, on that night. I was unsurprised but still devastated by the election results. I walked around in tears for a few days, the city felt cold and dark.

Maybe I was born to run (🤓) but by moving back to Paris, I am not avoiding anything. France is in a political crisis and the far right is gaining ground. The migrants and refugees of American wars, the rifts in the Middle East and climate shocks worldwide live in encampments in and around the city. It’s all very present as you walk around, and this is what a lot of my project is “about”. Also the project, the notebook, highlights the process of uncovering / questioning and learning as it unfolds. The scratchy writing and crossing out and editing and unfinishedness is present. Drafts, pages torn out, pasted back in, recombined.

Never have I felt closer to love, than there, alone in that city. ~ Anne Michaels