First Stop: Paris, Slightly Out of Frame
Dispatches from the Unretreat
Paris does not greet you. It doesn’t need to. The city is already mid-conversation when you arrive, and it will continue long after you’ve gone. It’s a city of layered sentences: the clipped horns of taxis, the hum of emergency sirens that sound oddly musical, and the wind, moving through the stone alleys and leafy corners as if it were the only free thing left.
Birdsong plays above the low hum of the city, perfectly tuned, as if piped in — but it isn’t.
There is a garden behind the Musée de Montmartre that almost no one mentions. Renoir painted there once. It is carefully framed — grass edged by stone, wildness manicured into reverence. You pass through hedges and into hush. Across the lily pond, the dormered rooftops of neighboring buildings lean in like they, too, are watching. The city hums beneath it all — invisible but persistent. It’s not quiet in the garden. But the silence is structured.
Visitors move gently here. They don’t need to be told. Unlike Notre-Dame, where an automated voice demands silence every five minutes in three languages, the garden keeps its own rules. Nobody raises their voice. Even the ducks call from a distance. No one is loud here. Even the schoolchildren seem softened. These aren’t parks. They’re pauses.
The wind, at least, remains uncurated. It moves how it wants.
Paris is contradiction. A postwar façade beside a brutalist block. A tower of glass stitched to a wall of ivy. Balconies spilling with geraniums, tomatoes, whole rows of potted trees. Some buildings appear abandoned to nature — or reclaimed by it — except someone inside is always watering something. There are windows that open fully with no safety catch, and someone always leaning out: smoking, stretching, watching. What I call “suicide windows.” What they call ventilation.
Some façades are so clean you expect a concierge to materialize. But graffiti is the great unifier. No surface spared. Some of it angry. Some of it art.
Cafés line the streets, their chairs angled outward. People sit side by side, not facing each other, but the world. If something meaningful needs saying, they turn slightly. Otherwise, they watch. The fashion, the dogs, the speeding bicycles, the tourists — sunburnt and wide-eyed, always walking slightly too fast, clutching their phones like compasses. Locals drift past them like tides around rock. Unbothered. Deliberate.
On the streets, the rhythms clash. Drivers seem to follow instinct, not law. Cyclists cut diagonally. Pedestrians float. Taxi drivers use their horns like punctuation, their hand gestures fluent in disdain. It’s a wonder anything functions — and yet it does.
I stopped for a coffee and was met with the familiar side-eye of the solo diner. A table for one is not a concept Paris particularly enjoys. I was seated in a corner, behind a half door, tucked from view like a shameful habit. My waiter — pursed lips, perfectly hemmed trousers — told me he’d lived in London for a while, but returned. Paris, he said, has “quality of life.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to.
An Uber driver, a student from outside the city, disagreed entirely. “It’s a good place to study,” he said, swerving between lanes, “but not to live. Too fast. Too sad. You can’t just enjoy life here.”
But Paris is not asking to be enjoyed. It’s not Venice. It does not depend on your adoration. If anything, it prefers not to be noticed. It’s not trying to be romantic. It just is.
I watched a dog — small, brown, ordinary — running behind his owner, who was cycling ahead with a baguette strapped to his back. The dog also had a baguette, clamped in his mouth like a mission. They moved in sync, both unaware of how iconic they looked. No one around me reacted. I was the only one who laughed. It was so quintessentially Parisian I almost expected them to stop mid-block for a cigarette. But they didn’t. They just carried on.
You think you’re imagining it — and then you’re not.
There is bread everywhere, not as affectation, but function. There are potatoes tucked into gratins and sandwiches and plated beside every conceivable protein. Pastry is the city’s costume. Bread is its spine. You chew it and move on.
The bookstalls along the Seine open late and close whenever. They sell the usual — postcards, yellowing magazines, obscure lithographs — and the not-quite-legal reprints of philosophy texts no one actually finishes. They are half store, half memory. You walk past them with no intention of buying anything, and suddenly you’re holding a dog-eared copy of Camus and wondering if your French is still good enough to deserve it.
You cannot work in Paris. Or rather, you are not meant to. There is no seating for laptops. No plugs. The cafés seem offended by the idea. I wandered for hours with a tablet under my arm like a contraband item. At last, a garden — near Notre-Dame, barely marked — and I sat among the shrubs to type. No one stopped me. Perhaps gardens are exempt from the rules.
A few evenings later, the road was cordoned off — police tape, sirens, a report of a suspicious object. The tourists looked ready to run. The locals looked bored. One woman, holding a cigarette at shoulder height, exhaled without breaking stride. The shrug is Paris’s universal gesture. C'est la vie (that’s life), it says. Keep walking.
It is possible to love Paris too much, in the wrong way. To collect it in snapshots and adjectives. To hoard its surfaces without understanding the weight underneath. But if you let it, Paris will teach you something quieter: that not everything needs to be beautiful to matter. That a garden can hush you better than a cathedral. That graffiti has grammar. That bread can be sacred.
Some cities want to be loved. Paris does not. Paris gives you what it has. You take it in your hands. You eat it while walking. You try not to drop it. You go on.
Come With Me
You’re walking beside me along the Quai Voltaire. It’s late afternoon. The air smells faintly of river and exhaust. To your left, the bookstalls are opening late, as they always do — green wooden boxes creaking, old hands brushing dust from dog-eared covers. You pause to touch the spine of a volume you don’t quite recognize, its title faded, its price uncertain.
The wind lifts just enough to turn a page. A Hemingway paperback flutters. A postcard slides to the pavement. No one notices. No one rushes to pick it up.
Across the water, Notre-Dame is still under scaffolding. There are tourists holding their phones to the sky, and behind them, an old woman eating a peach on a bench like it’s a full meal. Somewhere, a siren coils itself through the noise — not urgent, just inevitable.
The waiter at the café down the street has ignored us three times. The chairs all face the street. No one’s talking. They’re just watching — as if that’s reason enough to sit.
You don’t have a pen yet. That’s fine. You don’t need one yet.
Just stand here a minute.
Let the sentence come to you.
Now — let’s write.
Mini Workshop: Bread First
On writing what holds
In Paris, you can spend your life chasing the pastry. The perfect mille-feuille, the tiny tartlet that cracks beneath your fork, the croissant that holds its shape even under the weight of espresso. And you should. You absolutely should. But pastry is performance. The city runs on bread.
There’s a reason the baguette has laws. A proper one must contain only flour, water, salt, and yeast. No additives. No shortcuts. A form that holds. And underneath all the buttery layers and sugar-dusted cases — there it is. A line of people at 7 a.m., half awake, waiting for something they can carry under one arm and tear into without ceremony. Something that lasts.
Good writing isn’t so different.
It’s easy to reach first for the language that sparkles. The sentence that calls attention to itself. The image that makes you feel like a writer. But strong writing — the kind that lets a reader walk through it without stumbling — starts with structure. With clarity. With the sentence that just says the thing, and says it well.
So how do you do that?
You begin with what’s real. What happened. What was seen or felt or heard. You don’t worry about how it looks. You let your hand fly. You let the sentence find its own shape. Sometimes the first thought is closest to the truth — not the neatest, not the cleverest, but the one that makes your pulse move.
Say the thing you hesitate to say.
Write what’s not quite right.
Scuff it. Smudge it. Graffiti it.
Paris is a city of façades, yes. But it’s also a city of back walls and broken pavement and messages written in spray paint three stories high. Not everything has to be beautiful to be true. Let the rough edge in. Let the breath show.
Ornament is fine.
But bread first.
Invitation to Play: Tear Into It
Today, no neat sentences.
No clever openings.
Nothing polished. Nothing glazed.
Begin with the heel of the thought. The hard bit. The bit you weren’t going to write because it seemed—what? Too plain? Too much? Too close?
Forget the rest.
Forget structure.
Forget form.
Forget what it sounds like.
You are not required to be elegant.
Instead: jot, mutter, ramble, repeat. Be the dog chasing the baguette. Be the cyclist who never looks back. Be the pigeon on the statue’s head who doesn’t care who’s watching.
Write the thing that comes before the other thing.
The sentence before the one you’d usually keep.
The version before you edit it into something that fits.
Let the graffiti in.
Let the scaffolding show.
Tear into it.
Just for today, let the writing be rough, essential, and oddly satisfying — like bread you didn’t know you needed until it was already in your mouth.
About Me
I’m the sort of writer who likes deadlines and resents them. I believe in coffee more than clarity. I’ve written Flash, CNF, short fiction, and longer fiction, taught classes, and led workshops, but I still get nervous about opening a blank page. I think white space is a kind of genius. I think you are not wrong for hesitating.
This summer series is for you — if you write, want to write, or need to be reminded that art can begin in small, defiant scraps. I’ll be writing from the road, from café tables and slow trains and sun-warmed stone steps. You can write from wherever you are.
You’re already here. That’s enough.