Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. A contributor writer at Travel + Leisure, she also writes for Air Mail, Vogue, BBC Travel and many other publications. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News, for most of those years producing for Barbara Walters. She lives in Connecticut.

MARCIA DeSANCTIS

I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away.

I was actually writing for a long time, but I really had my first big byline the year that I turned 50. I was still 49, but it was my 50th year. Part of it was also reclaiming my past. I was a housewife. I was a full-time mother. I was teaching a little bit, and I was looking back almost in disbelief at things that were in such stark contrast to the life I was living now. Thinking – Wow, I once was in broadcasting with the most important television journalist of her generation, Barbara Walters, who I worked for.

And it was very hard to think that I was that same person. And so I started writing these smaller stories. It's hard to lose an identity. I had left New York City. I had moved to the country. I had given up my work, and I was kind of mourning the person I used to be.

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That is really when I started traveling and traveling with purpose, and trying to get that geopolitical angle that I had gotten more interested in and gotten a little expertise in. It was also when I realized that when I traveled, and when I left this beautiful, safe place called home, I was able to really appreciate what I had at home. So travel became a way to kind of quell my restlessness, but not quell it in the sense that I wanted it to go away, but quell it in a way that I could channel it into - literally some professional way that I could leverage it into stories. The worst way that I could say it was travel was a way to self-medicate, a way to deal with a major hormonal imbalance that happens - and to me to an alarming degree in my late forties - but also a way to take this restlessness and make something of it.

When I was in Northern India, everywhere I was passing by the Ganges River, and I realized that this story was about water. This story was about connecting with this place as I would a baptism. I'm a Catholic. I don't relate to India in that same spiritual way as a native of the country or as a Hindu would, but I can relate to it as a person in that I feel cleansed and refreshed and purified by water. And I felt a draw always to the water.

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A lot of my story in the Seychelles was about the environmental impact that developed countries have on a place like that, which is in the middle of the ocean that could disappear through rising seas. And it is really important that they have a voice and their voice is being heard. I mean, little Seychelles, population 100,000, is depending on the industrialized countries to do their part. But, sort of like my generation to the younger generation, industrialized countries are becoming aware of what they have done to these exploited countries, coastal countries, or island nations. And so, because they are aware of what they have done and the risks that all of our fossil fuels and a million other things have done to some of these more poor nations, they are giving these smaller places a seat at the table and letting their voices be louder and more heard. At some point, even ceding the floor to them, which I think is a really positive thing.

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There is a lot of responsibility, but I do feel that the optimism, the commitment, the openness, the level of care and concern of the younger generation is going to save us. I've already learned a lot from my daughter and her friends, the questions they ask, and the concerns they have.

I will continue to be open to learning from the younger generation, and I think the second that you give up hope is the second that you have declared failure. And I think nobody wants to declare failure. People want to still have children and want to still go to beautiful places and want those places to be safe and clean.  

Photo credit: credit: Elena Seibert


This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Colette Gauthier with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Colette Gauthier. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).