Our Story

What this substack is all about

Over the last twenty years and many visits that will be described in future posts, my husband, John and I fell in love with France, in particular with the south of France, Provence and Occitanie. The plane trees, the pace of life, the hewing to certain traditions, like Sunday family meals, the beauty and enjoyment of the outdoors, meant that whenever we traveled there, we just felt a lightness. We breathed easier.

Eventually, we began to dream of living there part of the year, for reasons we explain in the Why posts on this substack, reasons that are both specific to us and also general to others who fall in love with another place or country. This CNN article, like many others, explains that the idea of retiring abroad has been growing in popularity:

As time went on, we became more and more serious about our dream, investigating and making tentative plans. In 2022, our plans became more firm. As academics, we knew the first steps of any project were research, research, and research so we started doing that (in my, Stephanie’s, opinion, that’s also part of the fun). Occasionally, we also shared our plans with friends, many of whom replied, “ that’s interesting. We’d like to see how you do it. We might like to do that ourselves.” And so the idea of this substack was born, along with dividing it into “how” posts and “why” posts. Of course, being an early Gen Xer who wore out her copies of the How and Why Book of Dinosaurs and the How and Why Book of Rocks and Minerals, in particular, an overall theme became immediately apparent. Fortunately, my son’s partner, Maddie Moss, is an extremely talented artist and graphic designer (maddiemmoss@gmail.com if you’d like to inquire about her services), who was able to bring this theme to life for us.

In the beginning, we plan to post at least one “Why” and one “How” post per week, although once we are able to settle in here, in the future, it might be more like monthly or bi-monthly.

What else? A lot of people reading this substack already know who we are, but at the same time, we want to welcome newcomers so, without further ado: We are both writers and college writing professors–John is actually a recently retired college professor. Both of us have had blogs over the years and I even did a stint at the Huffington Post blogging about the writing life for about five years. John writes novels and short stories; I write fiction (novels) and creative nonfiction as well as books about teaching creative writing, something I’m also passionate about. In case you’re interested, I’ll put links to some of our books at the end of this post. 

We met during our MFA program at George Mason University  in the early 1990s, married, continued to a wonderful Ph.D. program at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette (a place steeped in French culture and influence) and then made careers at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, where Stephanie still teaches, because she is 6 years younger than John (although he would insist, technically 5 ½).There we were fortunate to raise two boys–Jackson, almost 28 at this writing, and Wilson, almost 24–who are now off making their way in the world, the former, a software analyst and programmer in Little Rock, Arkansas and the latter a cellist currently studying at Juilliard and living in East Harlem, NY.

We took them along with us on all of our France trips except the last one, leading them as tweenagers to the eternal refrain, “France? Again. Why do we always have go to France” Yes, France, again, we told them. When you’re a grown up, you can find your own places to fall in love with. But traveling as a family is a big reason why we ultimately wanted to put down partial roots here, as we’ll explain in later posts.

We’ve also raised a menagerie of cats and dogs over the years and are currently trying to figure out how to bring our sweet 10-year-old lab, Asuna (AHS-una) mix with us to France next summer, the process of which will certainly find its way into some how posts down the line.

So, that’s our story for now. The “Why” essays will delve a lot more into our lives, who we are and why we wanted to do this. We hope the “How” essays will prove to be resources about the way all this works, to provide a blueprint for anyone who’d like to follow in our footsteps. It’s all free for now, although at some point in the distant future we might put a paywall on the “how” links.

Enough about us. What about you? Introduce yourself if in the comments you want to, and let us know what brought you here, so you can come along and travel with us. We’re happy to answer questions any time.
Stephanie and John

Photo by Lucas Marconnet on Unsplash

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