Susan asked Stephen Greco:

How have your travels influenced your writing?

Stephen Greco Great question! I have been lucky enough to travel extensively as both a private tourist and a working cultural journalist, and in both cases I have tried to bring to my travels as much curiosity about other people and other ways of living as possible. In fact, during the ‘70s and ‘80s, for the occasion of my first visits to scores of cities and archeological sites in Europe, South America, and Asia, my partner and I studied for months before, using travel guides, historical documents, scholarly texts, and the like, in the hope that such preparations would help sharpen our observations and dissolve the mental impediments we might have to our taking in new discoveries. The resulting travel experiences have proved surprising and thrilling--all of which helps a writer create characters and settings that express ideas memorably and bring a reader more deeply into the story.

When I was a kid from a small town in upstate New York, we would drive thirty or so miles to the nearest big town for visits to the dentist, optometrist, and such, and on those drives over winding county roads I’d see, from my backseat window, house after house that had stood there for twenty or fifty or a hundred years or more, and I’d be drawn into contemplation about the lives that were lived in all of those rooms and yards, on all of those porches. It was a kind of contemplation that unlocked the mind, that I think helped prepare me for unexpected pleasures in coming years, like a simple barbecue dinner at a modest, outdoor roadside stand, on a dusty road outside of Cairo, in the ‘80s; afternoon tea with an elegant, aging operaphile in a cramped, memento-filled, Soviet-era apartment block parlor in St. Petersburg, in the ‘90s; and a kamayan feast with the young creatives of an artist collective in a repurposed auto garage in the Cubao district of Manila, in the ‘00s….

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