Author talks about experiences living abroad.
By: Emily Craighead
There is no homecoming for a world traveler raised on Long Island and dwelling in Switzerland.
Instead, for "Letters of Transit" author Matthew Stevenson, there are excursions to medieval villages in France, treks across World War II battlefields and daily trips to the local bakery for fresh baguette.
"Once you have moved across the ocean, no matter which side you’re on, it’s the wrong one," Mr. Stevenson told an audience that included his parents, Nick and Shirley Stevenson, at the Princeton Public Library on Wednesday.
The author read excerpts of his essays on travel, history, politics and family life abroad touched with humor and tinged with the longings for Cheerios, chocolate chips and maple syrup that color the life of an expatriate.
Like the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald one of the many authors, from Roald Dahl to Charlotte Brontë, referenced by Mr. Stevenson in his book his prose reaches from the shores of the Long Island Sound to the banks of Lake Geneva.
"Once one is abroad, to write about America from Europe is a theme that comes back to me," he said. "It may be a form of homesickness. It may be trying to reach back to something that is in my mind."
Mr. Stevenson’s travels and writings also reach back to his family’s past. They follow the ever-present theme of discovering where he came from and where he is going.
"One of the pleasures of Europe bittersweet, but still a great pleasure for me is that the villages of our family are spread across Europe," he said. "We are curious to see where we are going and where we came from. It is a family connection that has made living in Europe a little easier."
His essay, "Gray Footsteps in Northern Ireland," traces a trip to find relatives of his grandfather’s parents. He writes of a bomb scare and a 40-minute train ride to Belfast "into a suburban station that is as drab as anything in the Brooklyn Underground."
Family life, raising four children with his wife, Constance Fogler, in a village near Geneva has also been an adventure for Mr. Stevenson.
"My wife’s passport says she was unable to work unless she had a permit, which they don’t give you unless you’ve been there for about five years, so the work we chose was two more children," he told the audience.
Mr. Stevenson and his wife sent their children to the local Swiss school rather than an international school where they would speak English.
Until recently, the children were required to attend Saturday morning classes. They had Wednesdays off, instead, to pursue music, art, sports or other hobbies.
"We loved it, I have to confess," he said. "The house went quiet (on Saturday). It was the chance we had to be involved with the children and with their education."
Unfortunately, he said, the ski lobby consisting of parents who wanted to take their children to the chalet for the weekend before Saturday afternoon triumphed, and schools are now closed Saturday.
Politics play no small role in Mr. Stevenson’s vision of the world, and he has seen Europe’s evolution from its reaction to the outbreak of the war in the former Yugoslavia in 1991 to its strengthening unification today.
"The rest of Europe kind of took a deep breath and banded together," he told the audience. "It has brought a sense of stability to a part of the world, I think, will be peaceful and, I think, will be optimistic. And, I think, in a sad way the U.S. in some ways is standing apart from that."
Wherever he goes in the United States, he is asked how Americans are perceived abroad, particularly in light of the war in Iraq.
That perception among Europeans, he said, varies according to how long the Americans have lived in Europe.
"Some people come for two or three years and retain a sense of living in America while being in Europe," Mr. Stevenson said. Meanwhile, Americans who have been there longer, say 30 to 40 years, "feel a little caught between two worlds."
That sense of being caught between two worlds, of being in the Emerald City and longing to return to Kansas, as Mr. Stevenson put it, runs through many of the 27 essays in "Letters of Transit."
"Your mind changes and the book, I hope, represents some of the evolution therein," he said.
Mr. Stevenson’s reading was the latest in the Carolyn Llewellyn Champlin Writers Talking Series.

