eBook Released September 1st 2016
Travel Memoirs can transport you to a destination, and enable you to visualise people, cultures & experiences from another person’s perspective. I’ve created this collection of travel inspired poetry to draw you into Turkey’s Bodrum Peninsula. After writing travel guides about the area, I wanted to show the personal side of the location I now call home.
My poetry writing style is designed as an easy read. The rhymes should trip off your tongue and embed in your brain. I’ve created lines that will stick in your memory banks and come to you in a flash, much like the words of a favourite song.
If you like Travel Memoirs, this poetry memoir is for you. Ideal for reading on your mobile phone when you’re lining up for your morning coffee, or during your commute. Even better when enjoyed on location in Turkey. Although the experiences and people I’ve encountered are all based in Bodrum, some of the behaviour and interaction is relevant in other parts of the Mediterranean or Aegean, like Spain, Greece or Italy.
Foreword by Memoir Author Jack Scott:
Eleanor Roosevelt once famously said, “The purpose of life is to taste experience to the utmost.”I can think of no-one who has adopted this approach more energetically than Jay Artale, prolific blogger, writer, photographer, serial traveller and proud Turkophile. As ‘Roving Jay’ she bounds around the Bodrum Peninsula on our behalf and has produced two definitive and impressively detailed travel guides on the area; she has launched her evergreen blog, The Bodrum Peninsula Travel Guide, plugging us into the beating heart of Bodrum and its hinterland; she has shared her dazzling portfolio of photographs, capturing the colour and intricacies of Turkish life; and now we have a collection of her poetry – something she describes, modestly, as an ‘interlude’.
When I first met Jay in 2013, she was on a brief pilgrimage from her base in LA to the Norfolk flatlands of her birth. From the outset, her thirst for life – & for Turkey – was obvious. Like many people around the world, Jay was pining for a different way of living and she had her sights firmly set on Bodrum on the southwest coast of Turkey. Now Jay has made a life-altering leap, and judging by this unique collection of poems, she has chucked herself in with her usual drive and aplomb.
That ‘yearning for a change’ theme opens this collection – with the reflective and double-edged Turkish Coffee is my Cup of Tea. It will resonate with anyone who has regularly holidayed in Turkey: people watching and sipping tea or coffee at a Belediye café is pretty much synonymous with Turkish life, something picked up later with “Tulip cups with steaming tea,” in Forget Me Not. And that, in many ways, is the allure of Turkey. Approached in the right way, it offers expats an opportunity to carve out a simpler, if hugely stimulating, way of life. As we hear in Moving to Turkey, “All that clutter… anchored us down,” and “How many shoes does one girl need?” Quite.
Jay leads us through the whole gamut of feelings anyone who has pitched their tent in Turkey will recognise. We get the reality check of Our First Winter (“Rising damp, mould on the ceilings, and regular power cuts,”), the sea views of Enjoy the Dance (“skies that fall into the sea,”) and everything in between. But what makes this book is Jay’s acute power of observation, particularly when it comes to Gümüşlük, her local village. Here we get “A tiny mosque and a barber’s chair,” in A Quiet Place to Write in Gümüşlük, and “draping rods with ekmek bait,” and “eyebrows twitch at harbour boats in Gümüşlük’s Fishermen. She’s not afraid to say it as it is either, describing her pores as she hikes in the hills above Bodrum as “working hard like Patpong whores”. There is even a less than oblique reference to my own Bodrum legacy lingering “like a fart.” Ahem.
I was surprised when Jay told me about her poetry, & that’s what makes her such an interesting person to know. She is full of surprises.
