Member-only story
It was the end of summer and time to return to graduate school. I had spent the previous months in a bit of a daze, hopping from plane to plane, from bus to bus, with a backpack full of clothes and a handful of books. I had become obsessed with 19th century Brazilian writer Machado de Assis’ unassumingly brilliant storytelling, which I gobbled down as I made my way awkwardly from Peru down to Chile then to Brazil and back to the United States.
It was my first South America trip, that most writerly of experiences, which I attempted to complete with a single backpack. I had a sore throat throughout the entire summer and was perennially exhausted, but continually dragged myself through winding streets and from cultural landmark to cultural landmark, a curvy woman of color alone trying to emulate the experience a slim white dude would have.
In a random bookstore somewhere in Paraty, Brazil, my eye caught the spine of a book huddled between many others. It was slim but it was colorful, and it was love at first sight. It was Lydia Fagundes Telles’ short story collection Seminário dos Ratos (Rat Seminar), and for the rest of the trip I was mostly unable to put it down.
This had always been my love affair with going outside: I would travel to places that seemed impossible to the child I once had been — the north of Sweden, Lodz in Poland…