A route of her own.
Eight years is long enough. A note on what the next several years will look like, why they will take that long, and where the studio runs from while I am gone.
I have been reading Sloane's notebook for eight years.
It is a soft-cover thing from a stationer in Reykjavík, about the size of a hand, and most of it is not for reading. There are phone numbers, and the prices of film in krónur, and a drawing of a puffin that is an insult to the bird. There is also a list, and the list is what I want to write to you about.
Sloane kept a list of places she meant to go. It begins on page twelve. It ends where her last pen ran out, which was somewhere in the middle of the book. Some of the entries are towns. Some are coasts. A few are specific doors — a monastery on Naoshima, a lighthouse in the Orkneys, a kitchen at the back of a hotel in Lisbon that serves one thing at lunch. Next to some of them she had written the season she wanted to go. Next to some she had written the weather. Next to one, a stretch of coastline in Patagonia, she had written, in a lighter hand, with Wells, if he can be got.
I have read that list, I think, twice a year since. I have not been to any of them.
I will go now.
This summer, once Eleanor has shipped and the July Fund window has closed, I am going to begin, slowly, to walk the list. I expect it will take several years. I am not in a hurry and she was not in a hurry. The list has its own weather, and I mean to keep hers.
What this means for the studio.
The studio continues. Clara will run the Press from Vermont — she has been running most of it for two years already, and it is past time I said so out loud. Mary will keep the Fund going from her desk in Brooklyn; we will read applications the way we have always read them, and I will read my share of them from wherever the mail finds me. The barn stays. The October dinners will happen on schedule. Eleanor ships in June, as planned, bound in a linen that has taken longer to arrive than the book took to edit.
The only thing changing is where I am standing. Which is to say, not much.
What I have told the Table.
I have written to the founders personally. I will not be slower to reply than I have ever been — it turns out you cannot dim a candle that is already burning this low. If what they need is a long dinner in a city, we will have one; if what they need is a long letter, I am probably better at those than I have ever been.
If one of them needs a meeting room in Vermont, they are welcome to use the barn. The stove knows how to light itself by now.
Where first.
I will not publish the route. A list like Sloane's is not a plan, and I do not intend to turn it into one. I will say this much: I am going east first, and slowly. There is a coast in Scotland that has been in her notebook under the word October since the year we met, and I have never once been there in October. I would like to see what she meant.
After that I expect to go where she said to go next. There is a season I am waiting on for Patagonia, and I intend to honour it.
On writing home.
These letters will continue. I suspect they will get a little longer, because the thing I will have to write about will be the thing I am seeing, and the thing I am seeing was chosen by somebody I loved. The January Letter will arrive each January, as it has. Shorter notes will arrive when something warrants them. The address will not change. The replies may take a little longer than they already do, which is longer than I would like, and about as long as has turned out to be honest.
There is a superstition in this part of Vermont that you do not say aloud a trip you intend to take until the bag is by the door. The bag is by the door. I am saying it aloud.
Thank you, as always, for reading these. If you have a place that should be on a list like hers, I would be glad to hear about it. Sometimes you do not know what you mean to see until somebody else has seen it first.
With care,
Wells Connery
Vermont · 28 Apr 2026