("Pearl's Hand Reaching," Jocelyn Lee, 2008)

There was a time—not as long ago as I’d like to believe—when I imagined all novelists as Ernest Hemingways, hero-adventurers who shot tigers, fought in wars, seduced wild-eyed women, gambled their life savings at high-stakes poker, won duels, lost duels, and wrote frantic bursts of prose while standing upright in their rented rooms in Havana or Saigon or Beirut. I didn’t fully understand the standing-upright part, but I had read that Hemingway worked this way. At first I figured it had something to do with the immense ferocity of the act; surely he was too wired with genius to sit down at a desk. The more I thought about it, though, it occurred to me that the reason Hemingway wrote standing up was to allow a woman (his muse, no doubt) to more easily “inspire” him while he was in the midst of his demanding labor. This image—of the great writer madly scribbling masterpieces while being fellated by a native woman—haunted me. If this was the writing life, who wouldn’t want to be a writer? I should mention that, at the time, I had not read a single book by Ernest Hemingway.
Other myths of writing found their way into my head. Writers did not write every day but cavorted recklessly until, all of a sudden, inspiration hit. And what a moment that was! Like a shot of adrenaline to the heart. The writer had to drop whatever he was doing—lay down his pistol, leap out of his mistress’s bed, or turn around the bobsled, yelling Hi! Hi! to his huskies—and yank his pen out of his inkwell. He had to work fast, and not without a certain element of rage, in order to get it all down before the ghost moved on. And when the spirit did leave him, it was tragic, like Saint Theresa after her ecstatic vision passed: The writer was bereft, lost, alone. He lay down in the fetal position on a cold stone floor and he wept.
Yet in order to access this moment of divine inspiration in the first place, it was necessary to be in a beautiful—and ideally exotic—location. Somewhere that would allow you to have adventures. What kind of adventures? I didn’t know. Hunting lions in Kenya like Hemingway sounded scary; more appealing was the image of Vladimir Nabokov waving a net after butterflies in the Swiss Alps, or Samuel Beckett traipsing through the peat bogs of County Cork.
One summer, I finally got my chance. After having studied Italian for three years, I was hired as an intern at a large publishing company in Milan. I would live in Italy for two months in complete isolation, with plenty of time to read and think and, finally, to write. At last, this would be my chance to experience the adventures denied to me for so long, to make myself available to the whispering muses. I had just turned 21 years old. I didn’t know shit.