Sundry Updates

and exciting news!

Suomi. Photo by Olivier Darny

Victor and I returned from Finland on September 2 after the earlier return of Jason and Eleanor due to their tandem passport debacles. (Immediately resolved upon return to Italy, and thank goodness the US consulate here was not closed!)

I’ve got pages of Finland notes to turn into a post here. Many thanks to those of you who asked how it went! In a word: blissfully relaxing. Well, that’s two words. Finns would not approve. This was my longest trip yet - two weeks - back to the kotimaa (homeland). It was my fourth time to visit, Jason’s third (he married into the Finland trips), Victor’s second (but effectively his first, since he was just a toddler when we took him in 2012) and Eleanor’s first by any measure.

On this trip we spent time in Jarvenpää, Savonlinna, Naantali, Espoo, and Helsinki. No Rovaniemi or points north, no Arctic circle, I still haven’t been to Tampere or Oulu… the list goes on. Finland landwise is the size of Germany, with one-twelfth the population. You kind of wonder where everyone is. The forests go on forever. The coast is blue and cool. The Russian border is 1,300 kilometers and the Finns, in their diplomatic way, had much to say on the topic.

We learned that the population of Sweden, at ten million, is twice as big as that of Norway, or Finland, or Denmark, due to its arable lands, protected by the mountains to the west and the Gulf of Bothnia to east. But unfortunately Sweden can mostly muster just carrots to eat. All of Scandiavia imports a great deal of its food to market. We had a good laugh in the car wondering how many carrots a Swede might eat before they say tillräckligt! Enough!

We were wined and dined, steamed and pressed, ate our weight in salmon and muikku, and had a sauna with a cold plunge almost every single day. We twice smoked our own fresh fish and built a wood fire for the sauna every day we could. The light was long and late, the beds cool and quiet. Even the Finnish housedogs of our respective hosts seemed largely reserved and rarely barked. Given the ample peace, the days seemed to lengthen and stretch out to accomodate numerous phases and chapters of both activity and rest. It was wonderful. You would have loved it. I loved it.

More to come on all that soon. I promise.

But first, a couple of milestones that I’ve notched in the writing world. First, and hugely, this year marks the first time that I have been paid for a piece of fiction. Yes. Money into my bank account for a piece that I wrote from my heart, out of my experience, not on spec and not some adworthy marketing doggerel for an agency, with all due respect. I wish this lovely milestone had happened earlier in my life, like around age 24 in a moment when I was very hard on myself indeed regarding any “success” around my creative work and writing, but I’ll take it. At any age. Perhaps at 51 I am even more grateful for it. And not only was I paid for the piece, but the piece was the one that got shortlisted in June for the 2025 Gilmer Prize. I will be happy about this for a long time to come. Many thanks to the good people at Camel for all the encouragement and for putting their money where their mouth is.

And secondly, I love to write, but I also love to talk shop about immigration, culture (with a small c) and cultural adjustment. And, as an active Substacker, I have been laterly finding more and more quality content on the topic, which is heartening. One such writer I met here is Elizabeth Coleman, who writes Beyond the Postcard: The Truth About Living Abroad at https://substack.com/@elizabethink. (If you like this kind of content as much as I do, I urge you to go have a look.) After I saw a recent piece of she wrote, I sent her a note and we had a wonderful conversation to compare notes on life and culture (little c).

One thing led to another and we have now planned to meet on her regular Substack Live show on Sunday, Septemer 21 at noon U.S. Eastern time to discuss the dichotomy between expectations and reality [regarding living abroad], and the inability of some people to manage their disappointments. We will interrogate the origin of those expectations - internal (family lore), personal (study and language), or external (media, politics, and economics, for example).

Those of you who know me well understand my position to discuss these topics as a third-culture kid - my parents lived abroad and I am either gifted (or burdened) with Barbados as a birthplace in every Italian document, which blows Italian minds. I am living now in my 5th country (three in Europe - first Spain, then France, and now, for the longest time of the three by far, Italy). I got my first U.S. passport in 1993 and never looked back, although the travel bug has been calmed for me so much by finally being settled in Europe. My heart always wanted to be here - it felt at home here - and now I am here. Yearnings by and large diminished. (This could also be due to raising kids anywhere, but even if I’d never had kids, I think this would be the case for me).

I’ve promised her a short essay covering my first thoughts on the topic, which have now been marinating ever since as a very young child I began to notice and catalogue the difference between the cultures I moved among, in - respectively - the Finnish-American Upper Peninsula of Michigan (where we have deep family roots), non-Finnish Michigan (also very deep family roots), and Oklahoma (no family history to speak of, apart from the decades we clocked in the Sooner state). That will come as soon as I can write it, but these are topics I always mull, and thus words and insights are close at hand.

Please plan to find Elizabeth and me on Sunday, September 21 at noon U.S. Eastern time at Beyond the Postcard: The Truth About Living Abroad on https://substack.com/@elizabethink.

Kiitos!