Emailing with author Maggie Shipstead. Edith Zimmerman: Maggie! Okay. You travel a lot, but I know you recently (?) went to Bali. How and why was that?

Maggie Shipstead: So, I was in Bali from mid-November to mid-December of 2011. It was a time when I otherwise didn’t really know what to do with myself. A friend of mine had just been to Bali and posted the most amazing pictures, and I was like, “Me too!” I found a little guesthouse online in a town called Ubud that I rented from an American woman who’s lived there for 15 years — it was really pretty and nice. I spent a month in India once, and since then I’ve felt okay about making comfort a priority when I travel. I know I can sleep on a Himalayan bus if I have to, but hopefully I won’t have to ever again. Anyway, after Bali I went to Paris for three months on an artist residency, and after that I spent a month in Edinburgh, so when I described my schedule to people, they’d be like, “Um . . . are you Eat, Pray, Love-ing?”

So it basically WAS some kind of Eat, Pray, Love?

Well, I certainly ate. No praying, though, and I’m not outgoing when I travel, which dramatically reduces the odds of any love. Elizabeth Gilbert says in that book that her superpower is an ability to make friends wherever she goes — that is so not me. I spent eight months alone on Nantucket when I was writing my first book, and my takeaway from that whole time was that a) left to my own devices, I won’t make any friends because b) I’m kind of a furtive skulker, and c) I don’t really get lonely and so am not motivated. Plus, you can’t really Eat, Pray, Love (it’s a verb) unless you’re on a personal quest of some kind. I just wanted to go to Bali. It turns out, though, that I work most efficiently when I’m alone in an unfamiliar place. I wrote my second book in the five months between when I got to Bali and when I left Edinburgh, so now I’ve set myself up to be dependent on this weird, solitary, nomadic lifestyle. My landlady’s housekeeper in Ubud worried about me a little and would be like, “Maybe you come back next year and bring friends.” I’d be like, “Mmmm, probably not.” 

Edith Zimmerman: Jonny, you just quit your job. I’m going to send you a bunch of questions and you will hopefully respond to them, and I apologize in advance if the questions don’t link up with the responses immediately preceding them, but maybe you can use your amazing editorial skill to link them up?

Jonny Diamond: If you’d taken your time, Edith, to do a little research, you’d note that central to my resignation was the desire to do more writing, and less editing. So no, I won’t be helping you edit this email Q and A into a flowing, coherent conversation.

Perfect. So, you ran The L Magazine for 10 years (and you were my boss there for one of them), and then you added Brooklyn Magazine, and that was also good. Why’d you quit?

I never really envisioned a career in magazines (nor wanted one) — I don’t really like magazines all that much. I was an off-the-boat Canadian who needed work and ended up helping launch something that nobody thought would last. But it lasted, and the work was fun, rewarding for the most part, so I stayed. And stayed. For years I’d do my best to get up really early in the morning and write fiction, which was okay, and I was able to write some stuff I liked, but over time it no longer made sense to pour everything into a job that was sort of close to what I wanted to do with my life, but painfully far off at the same time. When you find yourself spending all your time covering people who are making things (art, writing, building, design, music) in the way that you would like to make things, you eventually reach a breaking point.

It’s also, obviously, a perpetually anxious time for print media, and insofar as we started this thing out of a love for the alt-weekly — which is now, as a form, essentially a regional novelty — I am definitely not the editor to figure out how to make the transition into whatever is coming next. Frankly, I’m really, really fucking tired of trying to figure out what’s coming next. Because you know who has an opinion about what’s coming next? Everyone.

I consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to work with so many wonderful, smart people over the last decade (like you, Edith!), but I want to spend more time working on projects with my wife (who’s an artist, and a writer/longtime contributor to The L and Brooklyn Magazine — she wrote the great cover story for my last issue of Brooklyn), and my son (who is neither artist nor writer, but is two). I think maybe not being the editor of two magazines and two websites, for the first time in ten years, might mean that I actually start to like magazines again. Which sounds nice.

A couple years ago, Megan Bernard biked from Eugene, OR, to San Francisco.

Edith Zimmerman: Megan! You biked for 10 days alone on the Pacific Coast. If my life depended on that, I would either die, or at the end of 10 days be walking alongside the bike a mile from where I started. Biking is horrifying madness, I don’t know where people like you come from, but I will grudgingly accept that you exist. [Pause for rebuttal.]

Megan Bernard: Ah, here’s the thing, though — riding a bike gives you transportation plus immersion into your surroundings plus autonomy. Go where you want to go, when you want to go, stop for coffee without paying for parking, and see everything along the way. Cycling can actually be the experience that car commercials want you to believe you’d have driving a Luxury Automobile.

[Nothing will ever sway me.] How did the trip come about, and what were you doing at the time? / How did you get the time?

At the time I was on a fellowship writing my dissertation. My experience of grad school was good/weird, because I worked a lot but my schedule was flexible. Writing the dissertation made me feel scattered and amateurish pretty regularly, but I had been cycling for years and I feel strong and competent with bikes. I wanted to do something difficult-but-fun for a little while as a change of pace. I had backpacked a fair bit, I had ridden one other big cycling tour (Chicago to Montreal) with a friend, and I have solid repair and mechanical skills. I chose this route because I loved camping along the Oregon coast with my then-boyfriend/now-husband, and I had never gotten to ride in real hills. I started telling people I was going to do it in December, I began planning in earnest in March, and I started the trip at the end of July.

Writer Shona Sanzgiri took a trip to India last year, and we asked him about it.

Edith Zimmerman: Shona, how was it, and how did you end up there?

Shona Sanzgiri: India was a mixed bag. And that was my fault. After a bad breakup, I was — surprise — depressed, exhausting my friends, and in a wallowing binge. And what a theatrical bummer: one night I ate an expensive dinner alone and tore up a 200 page manuscript I’d worked on for three years. Smart.

In general I was desperate for social interaction, but whenever someone paid me any attention, I deflected them with my neediness. I had nothing to say and couldn’t engage with people in ways that weren’t about my perceived suffering. So a vacation sounded like a good idea, preferably to a place that required me to be present.

Coincidentally I had been working on a documentary about India at that time. It attracted a little bit of money and started to seem like it was really going to happen. And I knew that sooner or later I’d have to actually go there and chart the logistics. Having family in Bombay, I decided to start there.

Edith Zimmerman: So you’re part of the company (Hourglass Footwear) that made these phenomenal Sriracha stilettos. Sriracha Stilettos. Would that be a good burlesque name?

Lisa Strom: Go for it! It would definitely be a good burlesque name. Maybe we can sponsor your act.

Kira Bundlie: We can paint the Rock Out design on other shoe styles — flats, mid-heels, stilettos, etc. … but I have to say that “Sriracha Stilettos” sounds a lot sexier for a burlesque name than “Sriracha Flats.”

How did those shoes come about, and how did the whole company come about? (I guess: what’s the brief backstory?)

Kira: We’re a group of nine female artists and designers who were tired of unreliable freelance projects and joy-killing day jobs. Lisa and I took a total leap of faith and left our jobs, launched a Kickstarter campaign and pretty much did exactly what you’re not supposed to do during a down-economy, but there you go. Eight months later, we’re doing booming business and we’re both starting to breathe normally again.

The “Ms. Opinionated” advice column over at Bitch Magazine had a pretty great discussion yesterday, sparked by That Chick Who Doesn’t Pay Her Share at the Group Dinner coming clean. No, you hate her, I know! But this one is really open and vulnerable about it, and how her friends all started making more money, and she didn’t, and the places got pricier, and wine and cocktails and blah:

Paul Brady recently went to Easter Island.

Edith Zimmerman: Okay, so Paul! You went to Easter Island a couple weeks ago (right?). What were the circumstances around that/why were you there?

Paul Brady: It’s true! I spent nine days at the start of February on Easter Island in order to do some reporting on what they call Tapati, an annual festival that is basically their version of the county fair. They elect a “queen” of the island (although this year there was only one contestant), show off arts and crafts, stage singing and dancing contests, and hold a triathlon that involves paddling a reed canoe and swimming and carrying 55 pounds of bananas around the crater of an extinct volcano. Also, of course, I saw a bunch of the eerie monolithic statues for which the island is famous.

And you’re based in NYC — how long did it take to get there? How much did it cost?

The weird thing about going to Easter Island, which seems like it’s the most remote place in the world, is that it’s actually not that hard to get there: You just have to buy a plane ticket! I flew on LAN from JFK to Lima and then connected Lima to Easter Island; I spent about 14 hours total in the air. The tickets cost less than a thousand bucks, which I actually think is a good deal, considering I flew 5,991 miles.

I’ve been a published fiction writer for the past 12 years and haven’t published a new book in 10 of those, which is not to say I haven’t written more material, it’s just that everything I write is consistently, unanimously rejected. I don’t normally advertise this information, but it’s routinely extracted from me. In bars, at dinner parties, even minding my own business on airplanes or among close friends — everyone wants to give me advice. Maybe you should become a schoolteacher? A paralegal? How about a nurse? A nurse in a psych ward? 

Because advice-giving can be contagious — once you get some, you really want to give some — I find myself making mental lists for my fellow Failures. I mean, how do you survive this constant kick and punch? “Would ‘Leave me the fuck alone!’ be a good response?” you ask.

Certainly. But who wants to be the ill-behaved, warlike Failure? Better to be the self-possessed, stately Failure, no?

In any case, here are some basic thoughts to get you through:

Diana Clarke recently traveled through Lithuania and Poland.

Edith Zimmerman: Okay. Lithuania and Poland. Why there? And where specifically?

Diana Clarke: Well, I study Yiddish and writing, and Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania (called Vilne in Yiddish) was once known as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” because it was the center of Yiddish literary and intellectual culture before World War II. It was very much the place I had mythologized to myself as the origin-point of my identity. Poland, obviously, was also a big Yiddish center (although the Polish Yiddish dialect is different, and much harder for me to understand — not that that’s relevant, given that there are basically no Yiddish speakers left in Poland now), but it’s also where my dad’s family is from. Polish Catholics — so between that and the Lithuanian Jewish background, I’ve inherited a lot of cultural guilt. Anyway, I knew I wanted to see Warsaw and Krakow — I’d just done a course on the history of Jewish life in Europe too, so I felt like I had a little more knowledge, and was a little more prepared to understand the context of where I was going. My academic program was in Copenhagen, and we had a two-week break, so I flew to Vilnius, and then took a bus to Warsaw (got my passport checked in the middle of the night), and an overnight train to Krakow, squeezed next to a very chatty Ukrainian man, and woken up every thirty minutes by the ticket inspector.

S.J. Culver recently went to Shanghai. Edith Zimmerman: Shanghai! Why?

S.J. Culver: I went for a work conference, which was awesome because I never could have afforded to send myself, nor would Shanghai have been my first choice for my next big trip, but it ended up being the highlight of my 2012. It was also a good trip structure for me because there was the psychological safety net of conference attendees I could latch onto if I got tired of being alone or if I had a problem, but in the end everything went swimmingly, and I only went out with other people once. I was there 10 days.

Do you speak Chinese?

Nope! I can say “hello” and “thank you,” and a friend taught me “don’t want” before I left with the slightly ominous caveat, “You’re going to need it.” I was too timid to ever say it (plus it turns out head-shaking is universal, duh). I said “thank you” one billion times a day. This was my first time traveling in a place where I had pretty much zero grasp of the language, and I found myself really trying to imbue “thank you” with a lot of different meanings.

“Thank you” = “Seriously, thank you.” “Thank you” = “This congee is the most delicious thing I have ever eaten” “Thank you” = “7 a.m. is an insane time to want to clean this hotel room.”