Marseille
Writing

Marseille is 2,600 years old and has never once tried to be Paris.

Port city · The oldest city in France · Mediterranean directness

Marseille was founded by Greek sailors in 600 BC and has been a port city ever since — a city that receives the world and is changed by it, that is neither purely French nor purely anything else but a layered accumulation of everyone who has arrived by sea. It is the most diverse city in France and the least impressed by Paris. The directness of Marseillais culture — the refusal of the Parisian performance of sophistication — produces a specific kind of human honesty that literary minimalism can use.

"In Marseille nobody explains themselves. They say what they need, they hear what you say, they make a decision. This is considered rude everywhere else in France. In Marseille it is considered efficient, which it is."

Tumbleweed Words — Marseille

The Marseille pieces are the most physically grounded in the Tumbleweed Words city archive — the smell of the Vieux-Port, the heat rising from the Corniche, the specific quality of Mediterranean light that is nothing like northern light. Physical specificity as a literary technique: put the reader in the body in the place.

David — Tumbleweed Words Flash fiction and poetry written on trains, in hostels, and in city streets. Published in Litro, Adelaide Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and The Dundee Anthology. Pushcart-nominated. Five years on Substack.