Writing Journeys is a collection of explorations into people, places, and perspectives, written by myself, Leah Nasson. I have, for the largest proportion of my life, been based in Cape Town, South Africa, although a period spent at United World College of the Adriatic in Italy birthed what has become a second home on the border with Slovenia. It was in Italy, as a 17 year old, that I was encouraged to develop what had hitherto been a contested relationship with creative writing, and while that contested relationship has continued since, a desire to keep writing has not rescinded.

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I was raised with walls of words. For most of my childhood, my memories of Saturday and Sunday mornings are hearing Vivaldi's Four Seasons or Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert provide the backdrop to my fathers single-finger tapping of a word processor as he wrote one of his forays into largely South African history. To be honest, at the time, I would have preferred the backdrop to be Reggie's Rush on KTV (just as much as I would have preferred the tours of northern France to include Eurodisney instead of the battlefields of the Somme), but now, as I firmly enter my forties, those memories are evocative of different ways of being and seeing the world.

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I'm interested in people who have been marginalised in a society that feels exponentially divisive, and in the unseen moments of our all-seeing age. I've always imagined myself as a not-quite-me—a person who might place herself in the middle, but who forever feels (and arguably wants to feel) on the fringe.

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Writing Journeys is my way of exploring the full picture: the margins and the mainstream, what's visible and what's overlooked, and the stories we tell about both.