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Stories play out in all sorts of locations. You might think of those venues for drama as a stage, where characters collide, declare their love or spit their vitriol. The stage itself seems to [...]

I’ve been having that feeling again. The sense that you exist on another plane from other people. That there’s no one on earth who can truly understand where you are right now. For the longest [...]

I love being able to do this – it’s like offering you a magic carpet, and transforming you into a Venetian writer, practising your craft in a 16th century palazzo. Now in its eighth year, our [...]

I wasn’t looking forward to Venice. I know – sacrilege, right? I wondered at myself. What did it say about me? Did it mean I was tired of life, as Samuel Johnson once said of London? But on our [...]

Writers of all stripes and levels of experience have something in common. It’s not necessarily a particular love of words. Some writers, after all, are moved more by a love of the rewards they [...]

I’m sitting in Campo Santa Margarita here in Venice at a café table, on the shady side of the square. Across from me, beyond the trees and a couple of benches, the late afternoon sun brightens [...]

I’d like today to write a disquisition on walking.  The subject might fascinate me because I am myself so bad at it. Whatever the reason, though, I’m sitting now on a turn of the Rio Malcanton, a [...]

We climb the stairs to the first floor of Ca’della Corte and mill about around the long dining room table. Liza says, out of the blue: “Persiflage…” “Persiflage?” I say. It’s a word I don’t [...]

I am fascinated by memory because it is at once so precise and so vague. I am astonished that our brains hold within them the minutiae of events and incidents – sometimes by any measure [...]

We know it can be difficult to find the time or the motivation to write with all the stress and distractions of everyday life. Do you often promise yourself that you will eventually get to that [...]

Six years ago I sat at a table at All’Armoria, a restaurant perched on the lip of the quay overlooking the Guidecca Canal in Venice enjoying the late summer sun and a fine Campari spritz. While [...]