Journey

Journey is a short story based on my mother’s memory of childhood summers spent in a Latvian village near the Estonian border. It tells of my great-grandfather deciding to go to Estonia to buy butter. They have breakfast, prepare the carriage and horses, and along the way my great-grandfather tells stories about the trees they pass and the neighboring farms. They visit a friend, chat, sing – and eventually arrive at the most unremarkable little shop at the border to get the butter. As with many stories, it is about the journey, not the destination.

The book contains this short story retold in different versions, inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, in which the same narrative is rewritten in countless ways. Here, the journey is retold backwards, with antiphrasis, without the letter “i”, in the style of Yoda, as a haiku, through emojis, as a typographical border matching the actual size of a block of butter, and in other variations.