Tangier
Writing

Tangier is where Bowles lived and Burroughs wrote and the Beat generation came to fall apart productively.

The gateway city · The medina · Africa facing Europe

Tangier sits at the northern tip of Africa, fourteen miles from Spain across the strait, and has always been a city of crossings — geographical, cultural, legal. The International Zone that existed until 1956 made it genuinely outside the rules of any single nation, which attracted writers, spies, exiles, and people who needed to be unreachable. Paul Bowles lived here for fifty years. The writing he did here was shaped by the quality of the light, the labyrinthine medina, the specific disorientation of a city that belongs to two continents and neither.

"In the medina in Tangier I was lost within three streets of the entrance, which I was told later is normal and also the point. The medina is not designed to be navigated. It is designed to be inhabited."

Tumbleweed Words — Tangier

The Tangier pieces in Tumbleweed Words engage with the tradition Bowles established — the foreigner in a place that will not explain itself, the limits of understanding, the beauty that is entirely indifferent to being perceived. Minimalist flash fiction suits this register precisely: what is left out is as present as what is said.

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.