Incognito Street: How Travel Made Me a Writer
by Barbara Sjoholm
Category: Travel

Barbara Sjoholm arrived in London in the winter of 1970 at the age of twenty. Like countless young Americans in that tumultuous time, she wanted to escape a country at war and set out for Europe, where she spent the next three years living in Barcelona and London, hitchhiking around Spain, and studying at the University of Granada. Set on becoming a writer, she read everything from Colette to Borges, learned Norwegian and Spanish, and explored her sexual identity. With the ghosts of a painful childhood at her heels, she looked for a writing voice and subject matter that would reflect her emerging political and artistic vision. Incognito Street is an evocative look at an adventurous, curious young expatriate and the forces that would shape her eventual career as a writer, translator, and publisher. Sjoholm captures the flavor of a time when the feminist and lesbian movements were just beginning, seen from the perspective of a girl searching for a voice and a self to call her own.