I am living in France since late August after 875 fabulous days of living in Spain.
I came here to represent the Office of the President at The American College of the Mediterranean and I am glad I did.
Some days ago, I began reading the notebooks in which I wrote and drew during the Barcelona days. It’s wonderful to be inspired by that Marianne who dared to return to Spain without knowing how it would all work out.
Aix is inspiring me, too.
I popped in to say HI – (my new abbreviation for Human Intelligence).
Since I began working at ACM-IAU aka The American College of the Mediterranean-Institute d’Universités Americains, life has been filled with newness and learning. Less posting, too.
I love to put together images to share with you, and that takes time, and today I will post with less images than I would like, because I want to post something.
Still writing.
Still heartened to see Lucy, go see. and I am home. moving in the world, being read, talked about. Still dreaming about translations and films.
Repeating the phrase Je veux encore jouer daily.
Sketching, snapshotting, looking at it all.
Also working on the delicious project of tasting and ranking French desserts.
Doors, stone heads, shafts and splashes of light. Virgin vines (les vignes vierges have a different translation, but I like this one). I enjoy these things and so much more in Aix.
It’s a curlicue place. Water running everywhere under the surface, making man-made structures lopsided, floors curvy. Immense plane trees, pines, cypress, walnuts, chestnuts. Ochre stone, a city chock-full of centuries of stories. Heads were chopped off here in a beautiful plaza in front of a church and stone heads adorn intricately carved wooden majestic doors. Places fit for royalty, archbishops.
Strange note to end on but there it is, thought about constantly as I walk through the city-center’s labrynth of wonder.
Here’s a slide show for you, quickly clicked together. A smattering. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for your attention. Love, Marianne
February 11, 2025. Barcelona, in the evening. A chime on my phone, I saw the link you see below and under it the words mi amiga marianne, then another chime: Hello Marianne. I listened to your rendition of the prelude, and first chapter of Lucy go see. It was a beautiful experience. Your writing is beautiful and powerful. You are a good writer… and a brave one! I shared the podcast with some friends…
I responded: Such good timing you have. I was writing when I heard your message come in. working on writing myself right, as I sometimes call it. Feeling down and writing, too, about writing, and all the time put into it and wondering if it mattered much–and then I saw this. Thank you very much. It means a lot and especially coming from you. Thank you so much too for sharing it. I’d so love to move this story further and wider into the world. A really big hug. I hope you are having a good start to your week.
As did she: The timing is not mine…probably🥰😅 Imagine….I read/listened to it early afternoon… and had to reflect a bit afterwards… powerful words… I shall buy the book. I thought you could try a public reading with your students…you do a superb job reading your novel… you are a good interpreter of “Lucy”… but personally I think they may not be ready for your honesty… and they may misuse the sacredness of it. I am afraid for you, but you know best… Am afraid of the superficial nature of some youth. On the other hand, you could help them tremendously… because of your experience and the healing over the years… you talk about it with great insight and wisdom.
The “it” my friend refers to is a sacred understanding of sexuality.
My friend is a sister of the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word of Houston, Texas, and a pediatrician. We met in a nearby café in Barcelona soon after I moved into this neighborhood in the fall of 2023, and we struck up a conversation. Within it, I learned she had returned to Barcelona after more than two decades in the USA, to care for her mother, who was in her early nineties. It was remarkable to me that I, after returning to Barcelona after my years in Iowa with my mother during her last years of life, was meeting a Barcelona woman who had returned to her hometown to do the same, after living decades in Texas, and who was talking of a future return there. We talked about that and many things including spirituality, sanctuary, sacredness, swimming, and the themes of wound, eros, and voice that are prevalent in my work. (We have continued this conversation ever since.)
You probably guessed I am a nun, she said.
No, I said. Why would I?
My collar, she said, lifting her shawl. To me a lace collar, nothing more. My cross, she said, holding the pendant around her neck.
It’s pretty, I said.
You probably already have many friends, she said.
I’d love to yours, I said.
A few weeks later, she sent me an article she had written about vulnerability, wounds, and wisdom that I’d like to share with you:
Our friendship continues to flourish, enrich, and reveal what can easily be seen as divine timing and connection.
I was grateful this week to be reminded through her that what means so much to me is worth doing, and it will continue to be surprising in its revelations. This is one of the stories of how it has moved and moves in the world.
Thanks for reading. May you marvel at your life, and this world.
This slideshow is a fraction of the snapshots from a fraction of my journeys during 2020 – 2023. The first shot is of my feet up in the garden of a Silver Lake sanctuary in Los Angeles while I was musing on where to go next, in between–amid other ordinarily extraordinary things–getting two books out into the world. One could say I was in a foxy den there, licking wounds in a beautiful spot. I was also writing, editing, teaching online, and occasionally acting. Most of my adventures were driving explorations through grief–of losses and disasters, some willed, most not. They also were celebrations of freedom, and often after a completed draft. While writing about these journeys recently, I realized though I was alone in the car, there were many other folks in there with me, perhaps listening to the conversations I was having with them and myself about love and home.
And now, I enter a new era of my life. This week I joined the Barcelona team of the American College of the Mediterranean as a full-time Faculty Advisor. After years of working on my own from wherever I was, and searching for a place I would love to land and work with others, it is happening, and I am really happy about that. I am also deeply grateful for the pleasures and gifts of the solitude, wandering, and wondering of the last eight years. What a wonderful time I had exploring the country I was born in, then making my way back here, to this Barcelona home, to this city and sea I love.
I have spent much more time than I planned on selecting images and have to stop and go out for a walk up on the mountain overlooking the city before the light goes. I would love to show you the beauty I saw throughout California (there are only a couple of shots in this video of the splendid Sonoma Coast). And there are so many Midwestern travels I’d like to share, including the Upper Mississippi Valley I love so and wrote about in I am home. All these journeys could each be a book and movie on their own. So could other amazing travels during those American years–alone, and with my son–across the US, within Mexico, and finally back in Europe. It’s been a traveling life.
But this little picture show is already eight-and-a-half-minutes long. A good accompaniment to coffee in the morning. I selected the shots with the intention of putting you in the driver’s seat.
Traveling far and long alone, I saw the diversity of the United States and witnessed the behavior of some of its inhabitants. There is outrageous wealth and gutwrenching misery. Opulence and abandon. Cruelty and kindness. Violence and generosity. There are also folks living simple and beautiful lives.
Ah, the open roads! The vast landscapes. The freedom. The beauty. I highly recommend that everyone solo travel for a while.
When I see myself in some of these shots it makes me feel happy. I loved hanging out with Marianne.
Life is a precious opportunity. I am looking forward to sharing my love for it with curious students from across the United States who come to Barcelona to do their own exploring.
Thanks for your time. I hope you find this imperfect offering inspiring.
When I started my meander on this special day, I was unaware that Iowa would appear near the end of it. Roses on a balcony moved me first. As I mentioned before, Sant Jordi is a romantic Catalan holiday that celebrates love and Catalan literature. It is a combination of remembrances from different periods of history–for one part, it commemorates Sant Jordi slaying a dragon and offering his beloved a symbolic red rose from the bleeding belly of the beast, and for the other part, it celebrates a 19th century Renaissance of Catalan identity and culture. It’s marvelous to live in a city where people gift each other books every year on a day associated with romance and culture (almost two million books are expected to be sold), selecting them and also rose arrangements from vendors while strolling through the city’s wonder-filled streets, blocked for pedestrian traffic only. The symbolism of the day started, for me, in a private school up on the hill where I was being interviewed for a position to teach about books, writing, reading and speaking. I was then invited to see a special poetic performance and was witness to that wonder along with the prize-awarding to students in Sant Jordi writing competitions. I walked down the hill under ever-changing April skies, the scent of orange blossom filling the air, then made myself some lunch at home, with the plan to wander through the streets after. A friend from a village nearby called to say she was coming to town to see it all, too, and we met in the center of the city and had coffee at the café in the Hotel Pulitzer. While there I received a message offering me the teaching position. When my friend and I separated I headed for Paseo de Gracia because I wanted to see the Casa Battló decked out in roses for the day. Everywhere I looked there were smiling people, books, and roses. A helicopter whirred overhead and I imagined the view and wanted to be up there, too. As I was wondering if Laia Fabregas would be at the ONA bookstore (one of more than three-hundred bookstores in Barcelona) stall, I looked and there she was, signing books. So I stopped to buy her new award-winning book, El silenci dels astronauts, confident I would be able to understand the Catalan and when I did not, I would increase my vocabulary. Reading stories in other languages is an especially sweet way to learn them. I carried on strolling gently up the hill of Barcelona’s most luxurious boulevard, lined with modernist architectural masterpieces, cafés, restaurants, and high-end shops, marveling again and again at the quantity of readers and the grace of a culture that celebrates reading. I stopped to admire the Casa Battló with thousands of others. Then kept heading toward another favorite place, the magnificent Casa Fuster, and its Café Vienés, pausing along the way to look at books and roses. There was a Book of Mormon, in English, propped up outside in the window of the café. I called a sister in Iowa to mention this oddity and there was no answer. Then, I was drawn to the book stand ofMales Herbes, a publisher who has published some of my favorite US and French authors in translation. I noted all the striking green covers of the books, some of Kurt Vonnegut’s among them, and commented on that to a friendly woman standing behind them. Then I saw one with the title AIOUA–I mouthed the vowels in Catalan–it sounds like IOWA. I stared at it for a while then turned it over and saw that it is about a woman who travels to and throughout Iowa in search of peace. I read the author’s name. Is Roser here now? I asked. That’s me, the woman I had already spoken to said in Spanish. I’m from Iowa, I answered in Spanish. Her eyebrows rapidly scaled her forehead as she said, Are you serious? She told me about driving around the state, her desire to return, and before long we were talking about the International Writing Program in Iowa City and other beloved places. Roser pointed to the photo of Strawberry Point on the cover, something I had overlooked when I fixated on the vowels, and I mentioned my parents talked to me about going there, and one of my brothers liked it. I kept to myself that these three people were now dead and I grieved them deeply. We spoke of getting together for drinks and a meal soon and as she signed my copy, she said we have to take a picture, and she kept marveling that on Sant Jordi in Barcelona, promoting her book AIOUA, she had met a real live Iowan who chose to live in Barcelona. I think we are less rare than people imagine yet it is true that I am the only Iowan I know here. I have made some marvelous Iowa-Barcelona connections in my life, other great stories to tell, and this was wonderful to add to the list. I can stop here, this is a perfect ending, I said after she wished me a wonderful rest of the festival of Sant Jordi. And then I wandered more, uplifted and connected. The Barcelona Film Festival was also happening so I saw a wonderful comedy. All afternoon I had been craving one of the many pastries I had seen, and after the movie noticed there was one golden yellow rose left at a nearby bakery. As I waited to be served, I saw a new friend passing by with a smile on her face and went out to call to her, Paz! I sang out (Paz translates as Peace. She is from Barcelona and lived in the US for about as long as I lived in Spain). She was too far down Calle Asturias, so I went back inside and called her. I’m on my way to meet my kids at the English bookshop then go somewhere to eat, she said. I felt a pang of envy. While feasting, a featured photo came up on my phone–there was my son, dressed as Sant Jordi for a school play on this day in 2006. My sister called from Iowa as I was walking home and I told her all about the perfect day. I just want to go home and go to bed now, I said. I imagine, she said. Just to make sure it stays perfect, right?
Sant Jordi, or Saint George, is one of Barcelona’s patron saints and he is celebrated on April 23rd each year. The streets of the city fill with stalls celebrating authors, and selling books and roses. It is a romantic and cultural festivity on what is now also World Book Day. To demonstrate their love, people gift each other books and roses.
I am looking forward to this hour on this coming Saturday at noon to join in the celebration. If you know folks in the Garraf district of Barcelona who are interested in writing as a spiritual path and the search for home, and who like to read in English, would you please tell them about this gathering on Saturday in this special place which is an oasis?
It means a lot to me to talk about writing as a spiritual path in the place where my path took me for a decade while I lived in Sitges in–what seems like eons ago sometimes–the late 90s and early 21st century. I received a lot of nourishment and inspiration here.
Is there someone on your Christmas list who likes to read? Who enjoys true stories? Who loves home, and loves to travel, and wonders about how others live in the world and what freedom costs? Who loves Iowa? Who especially loves the Upper Mississippi Valley of Iowa? And loves and wonders about Spain and Iceland and France? Who loves driving? Who loves rivers, valleys, and being in the great outdoors? Who loves life, family, friends? Who loves to walk, dance, and swim? Who sees beauty everywhere? Who appreciates absurd humor? And sees the humor in even the difficult moments? They will probably also love this book.
It has been called a book about the wideness of love, a book about what it means to be a free spirit in this world, and a book about what it means to be home. It has been called a memoir hiding inside other genres. It has been called amazing, brilliant, heartbreaking, enthralling, relevant, resonant, brave, inspiring, moving, insightful, incisive, beautifully written, and soothing.
If you’ve read and enjoyed it, please spread the word. If you haven’t read it yet, please give it a chance. It would be wonderful if you asked your library to order it.
If I could afford it, I would hand out copies everywhere.
Here, at this desk, looking at this view, I smile thinking about how writing and reading connect me to other souls who are also interested in being as alive as we can be. I imagine these people believe that life is a chance to exalt and contribute.
“They are your contribution to humanity,” a friend said recently when I wondered about the value of my books and the time spent writing them.
Happy Thanksgiving! I am in Spain, craving warm fixings with loved ones, and giving thanks for family, friendship, resilience, and growth.
This is plant that adorns the cover of I am home. It was given to my mother in 1952 at the birth of her firstborn, a son, Tommy. I only knew him through stories and photos because he died, at 8, before I was born. In the family we called it Tommy’s Plant, and sometimes I called it the Tommy Mommy Plant, and recently I have been calling it Millie’s Beanstalk. I guess I could call it Marianne’s Beanstalk because I would likely have been the child to trade the cow for the magic beans. I love that Mom is in it, the whole family is in it.
The image of the plant in the middle is recent, here in Barcelona at home. The drawing on the right is how it started in 2005 in Sitges, when I brought a cutting of it from Mom’s plant back to Sitges. That’s also a recent shot, of course, with the book in the plant’s arms. That globe on the cover is the World Book one we had at home and I often dreamed about traveling all over it.
The long story short is that I gave the plant to a friend when I went back to live in Iowa in 2012. Before I did, I took a cutting from that plant, carried it with me, and re-rooted it in Dubuque. It lived with me there, and in Chicago, Iowa City, and Los Angeles. I added some roots of another immense dieffenbachia I saw thriving in the offices of the memory care center where Mom died..
The plant never quite thrived and multiplied in the USA in the same vigorous manner it did in Sitges, but it stayed alive and shone. In 2021-2022, I spent six months back in Europe and left it outside in the garden where I lived in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, where I have seen many dieffenbachia thrive. Looking through the photos now, I notice that it started to decline most seriously when my son moved to France from LA. He also loved that plant. I was sad to learn of its death in the spring when I returned, and told myself that 70 years was a good life, and everything must die, I guess.
That summer, I traveled to Iowa and when I walked into a brother’s house in Dubuque, his wife said, “Marianne, do you remember when you moved to LA and you left us a cutting of your mom’s plant? Look at it now,” she pointed. “But something weird is going on with the leaves.”
“It lives!” I said, raising my arms in the air and rushing toward it. The sister next to me grabbed my hand to stop me from separating the leaves that had attached to each other at the tips–both their own and that of others nearby–and weren’t unfurling because they were blocked by that attachment.
“Wait, let me count them before you do that,” my sister said, and she counted seven. “I knew it. That’s the number of Mom’s children.”
“Well, let me free them,” I said, chuckling, and showing my sister-in-law how to gently detach them both from themselves and others nearby so they could unfurl on their own. “It happens sometimes, they get too close or turn in too much as they grow and you just have to give them enough room so they don’t.”
what they looked like after separation, ready to unfurl on their ownIt would have worked better if I had cut more from the base.
I took a cutting of that plant back to Los Angeles with me. It was a long, adventurous drive, and the Tommy Mommy plant cutting made it but didn’t last long once there. It was a month or so later, as I was pondering a return to Barcelona to live and walking around Silver Lake one afternoon, when a friend I met in Sitges, who now lives in Northern California called. “Marianne, I have to tell you something. Do you remember that plant of your mom’s you left with me when you went back to Iowa?” I couldn’t speak, just hmmed. “Well, you should see it now,” she said. “It’s huge. The woman renting my house just sent me a picture.”
I had forgotten I gave it to her. And I took it as a sign. And here I am in Barcelona, and here is the plant. We’re together again. It’s difficult to take my eyes off her.
I’d like to tell you more about Tommy and plan to make a book about him and his short life. I wrote some about him in I am home. He was born with a lot of physical obstacles. Here are some photos of a much larger selection, kept safe in a sturdy gray box with TOMMY, in Dad’s handwriting, on top.
“Be glad you can see, sit, stand, walk, and talk, just be glad you have a body that works like yours does,” Mom used to say when I complained about my unfortunate life sometimes.
Sweet news via Chez Soi Press. I love knowing I am home. will be on the shelf in the Iowa City Public Library, one of the many places where I worked on it.
I moved to Iowa City from Chicago with a first draft completed (started in Dubuque and written throughout the Midwest, Iceland, France, and Spain then completed in Chicago on a fine day in May, hours before I did a reading and presentation of Lucy, go see. at the wonderful 3rd Coast Café).
When I left Iowa City nine months later to move to Los Angeles, the fifth, or was it the sixth, or maybe the seventh? draft went with me. Anyway, there were more drafts to come until I finished it there on the Pacific with the Angels. And here I am with the fox in Barcelona. We made it this far home.
“Holy Hell!” is what I said aloud when I looked at the portrait of St. Agatha holding her breasts on a platter in a chapel dedicated to her within the Royal Palace in Barcelona. It was my introduction to her so I did some research and found out how the story goes. Born in Sicily around 231 AD, she became a consecrated virgin, meaning she chose to dedicate her life to God instead of a man. Later she became a martyr. This was after Quintiamus, a supposed diplomat, was enraged by her refusal to marry him and her rejection of his advances. He ordered her breasts cut off as punishment, then imprisoned her and tortured her in many ways, while she remained true to herself. Legend has it that while she was imprisoned, she was healed and her breasts restored and the Q man, further enraged, ordered her burned alive. That is how she died in 251 AD at the age of 20.
Thinking about some of the narrator’s relationships with men in I am home. I felt a kinship with Agatha and spent time there enjoying the energy in that space near her portrait and the alcove, talking to her about courage and integrity, and telling her about experiences with refusing men almost two-thousand years later. I looked for a sign noting it was her chapel, for a sign about the painting and her life, looked for the painter’s name to no avail, and noticed on all signage of the chapel there was no mention of Agatha on the premises other than her name painted in the halo around her head. An internet search on St. Agatha’s Chapel will turn up St. Agatha’s Royal Chapel, and more. Yet, for some reason, mention of her story is omitted within this inspiring and beautiful space. I asked a woman who was touring the chapel if she knew about her and her story and after she shook her head, I told her what I knew. She then bowed before Agatha’s portrait. I wondered why there were no pews in the nave, no place to rest, other than a few low square stools off to the sides in the alcoves placed in front of televisions to watch videos about Barcelona. No mention of Agatha there, either. I slid one of the stools in front of Agatha’s portrait and under the center point of the vaulted ceiling and let all that energy charge me. I felt at home.
One reader wrote to say, “The sentence I most relate to is: ‘I initially chose Barcelona for how I feel when in it: free and connected to something I cannot name or understand.'”
Have you ever had that feeling about a place? Barcelona is important in I am home. and in Lucy, go see. I am working on a short piece about our love affair, Barcelona’s and mine, and will share it with you soon.
“You write about it beautifully,” I was happy to hear.
Have you been to Barcelona? Come travel with me, and make yourself at home.
Things like “I’ve been loving every sentence. Reading it slowly to make it last.”and “I’m absolutely #loving it! #Powerful#writing.”
This makes me feel so good after all the sentence crafting. Sometimes it feels like surgery or that game we played as kids called Operation – feels like that when I try to move #words and #sentences around without #touching others.
it means a lot to know what what I’ve done does for others 
Marianne Maili 