In this edition of Let’s Go, with Matt Ortile: a blog about going on book leave, and thoughts on the video game Persona 5 Royal, a virtual ad for the Japanese tourism board. Also, I’m teaching a class on travel writing at The Center for Fiction this fall.

I’ve been lucky enough to go on book leave three times in my life. “Book leave” being an extended period away from professional and personal commitments to simply write.

I spent all of July 2019 at MacDowell, a writing residency in New Hampshire to finish the first draft of my essay collection The Groom Will Keep His Name. The all-expenses-paid fellowship gave me a cabin in the woods, three meals a day, and ample space to get in the flow of producing pages. I didn’t travel exactly; I was holed up in the air-conditioned library for much of it. But the nearby town of Peterborough was quite charming, and I got to meet people from all over the world taking their art as seriously and irreverently as I did. (Among them was a college professor of mine. I was very proud to share a Serious Writer Community with him only five years after graduation.)

The other two book leaves were self-funded and spent in France. In April 2019, I stayed for ten nights in a shared, refurbished apartment in a 14th-century manor just outside of Guérande in the Pays de la Loire. I found it on Airbnb while dreaming up a pseudo-Call Me By Your Name getaway, writing in a historic home and napping under the European sun. I borrowed a bike from my host every day, exploring the environs and cycling into town for bottles of Muscadet, which I drank while untangling the most difficult chapters of Groom. One was ultimately cut because it wasn’t helping the book. I credit that time away for letting me accomplish in a week what would have taken me two months here in New York, chipping away at it in weekend spurts.

My most recent book leave was in Reims, in August 2023. I scored 12 cheap nights at a flat in the city center. During the day, I toured the Champagne houses and ate prix-fixe lunch menus at restaurants; in the evenings, I outlined and developed my novel, writing until three or four in the morning. Reims was perfect for this kind of hybrid travel. The town is, at most, a two-day stop; even the locals regularly make the 45-minute TGV commute into Paris for both work and play. Staying in town for nearly two weeks, I did enough sightseeing to satisfy my touristic needs, and felt little guilt for burying my nose in a notebook or my laptop for hours, whether in my Airbnb or in front of the gorgeous Notre Dame de Reims with a glass of blanc de blancs. Thanks to that leave, I came back to the US with a deep understanding of my next book. But I haven’t made much movement on it in the two years since. I began my job at Traveler a week later.

All this to say, I’ve been considering another self-funded book leave. I have a new project with a self-imposed deadline I’d really like to keep. At the start of August, I tried to do an “at-home” book leave here in Brooklyn and used vacation days to get a four-day weekend. But this summer has been so draining—however fun and gratifying and travel-filled—that I wound up spending Thursday and Friday entirely horizontal and not writing a single word. I needed the rest, yes. My body was telling me to take a beat, I got it. Or maybe I didn’t. For the past 10 days, I’ve been neck-deep in a big print feature for the magazine while enduring some kind of tonsillitis.

I don’t mean to incessantly complain about work and the demands of regular adult life. I’m just wistful, I suppose, or nostalgic for those halcyon book leaves of mine. In those precious slices of time, I felt most like the artist I want to be. I was focused on a goal and clearly making progress toward it, while simultaneously free to follow whims and detours. (And for two leaves, I was living in France. So, you know, I loved that.)

Maybe what’s most appealing about a book leave is that divorce from daily duties—but as I write that, I realize I still had to do laundry at MacDowell, grocery shop in Guérande, and budget my spending in Reims. Perhaps more crucial is the separation from the “other things I could do” while in Brooklyn, like cleaning the house, organizing my closets, playing video games, and getting ahead on tasks at the office. At home, the distractions persist; I slide into the usual routines I mean to break. In the middle of the New Hampshire woods—somewhere unfamiliar, stunning, and empty—my only option was to write.

Some folks might say I simply need to be more protective of my writing time. That’s true. For me, I think, I need to make that time as well as find that space. I’ve been most successful when I travel—almost physically move into that mindset. Sure, it costs money, but if anything, that’s even more of an incentive. I spent cash to give myself this freedom. I better do what I said I would: figure out a chapter, finish a manuscript, start something new. The sentiment is almost baked into the word itself. Leave has roots in the Old English lēaf, meaning ‘permission.’ Maybe this October, I’ll go somewhere beautiful and quiet to write. I’ll permit myself to take some time off—give myself leave—to be the artist I want to be.

housekeeping: a travel writing class this fall

I’m getting my fall teaching semester in order. The first class now officially available to join is this two-day weekend intensive I’m leading at The Center for Fiction, called How to Write a First-Person Travel Essay. It’s set for November 1 and 2, 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET, over Zoom. We’ll have short lectures, in-class discussion of readings, and generative exercises that will help you find ideas for a travel essay that you can continue to develop after the weekend is over. Sign up here ($175 for six hours).

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checking out: Persona 5 Royal

WHAT: It’s a Japanese role-playing game, a critical darling, and one of the most popular of the last decade. Major themes include rebellion, vigilante justice, oppression in Japanese society, and Jungian psychology. (Video games are art, this one especially!)

WHERE: The narrative is set in Tokyo, and one way you progress in the story is by unlocking more and more of the city map, and exploring a virtual landscape that not only captures the spirit of the Japanese capital, but replicates pockets of it with deep fidelity—so much so that fans have used it as a travel guide to Tokyo and made pilgrimages to sites that appear in-game.

WHEN: The original version, Persona 5, was first released in 2016. This enhanced version featuring new content, abbreviated to P5R, was released globally in March 2020. It was grimly fortuitous timing, as travel was limited during the pandemic and virtual tourism like this took on a welcome luster.

WHY: I’ve picked P5R back up in the last couple of days; I was playing it in 2024 but stopped because I was focused instead on Final Fantasy XIV.

FIELD NOTES: I bring it up now because P5R reminds me that I desperately need to go to Japan. I still haven’t been. I should also say that I was first introduced to the franchise via the game’s sequel, Persona 5 Strikers, in which the main cast travels throughout Japan, visiting Kyoto, Osaka, Sapporo, Sendai, Okinawa, and Yokohama. (I swear, JNTO has a vested interest.) So to me, the Persona 5 titles have always been “travel games,” in the same category as titles like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which is famous among ancient Greek scholars for virtually producing a polis-era Greece with such accuracy that playing it feels like time travel. Anyway, it’s been fun traversing Tokyo in P5R from the comfort of my couch. Also the game features a lot of food, and I’ve been looking up recipes for Japanese curry so I can make it at home. If you have thoughts on the Vermont Curry vs. Golden Curry debate, let me know.