It’s said that writers never really finish a story or a poem or a book – they just send it off, finally, to an editor. This is probably truer with fiction and poetry, but I recently wrote an essay about travel books and, thinking it was done, sent it to a couple of magazines. Then Saturday night, driving home from a Seraphic Fire concert and listening to the BBC, I heard a report about the earthquake in Myanmar. I was actually about to change the channel and listen to something more cheerful, like bluegrass, but Hania asked to keep it on. As the reporter spoke, my mind turned to George Orwell, who spent time in the country as an imperial policeman, an experience captured in his novel Burmese Days. Remembering that book led me to think of a nonfiction book with a similar title, Italian Days, by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, which I had forgotten to mention in my essay. Sunday morning I called up the essay and added Italian Days to the paragraph that lists excellent travel books of the 1980s, marveling at how, through the mysterious process of association, listening to a news report about the earthquake in Myanmar had provided me with a missing item from an essay on a completely different subject. This morning I will resend the amended essay to the original recipients, hoping that they were too busy to read the first version.
