A Hard Place To Leave: A Conversation with Marcia DeSanctis and Erin Byrne

Co-presented with Elliot Bay Books.

With travel restrictions easing back, Folio invites you to a conversation and wine reception with  New York Times  best selling travel author Marcia DeSanctis and award winning travel author Erin Byrne.

Restless to leave, eager to return: this memoir in essays captures the unrelenting pull between the past and  the present, between traveling the world and staying home.

Starting in a dreary Moscow hotel room in 1983, weaving back and forth to rural New England, and ending on a  West Texas trail in 2020, Marcia DeSanctis tells stories that span the globe and half a lifetime. With intimacy and  depth, over quicksand in France, insomnia in Cambodia, up a volcano in Rwanda, spinning through the eye of a  snowstorm in Bismarck, and atop a dumpster in her own backyard, this New York Times bestselling author,  award-winning essayist and journalist for Vogue and Travel + Leisure immerses us in places waiting to be  experienced and some that may be more than we’re up for. She encounters spies, angels, leopards, shoes, the odd  rattlesnake, a random head of state, and many times over, the ghosts of her past. Each subsequent voyage leads to  revelations about her search for solitude, a capacity for adventure, and always, a longing for home.

Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. A Contributing Writer at Travel + Leisure, she also writes for Vogue, Air Mail, BBC Travel, The New York Times, Tin House, Creative Nonfiction and many other publications. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of two Grand Prize Solas Awards including the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she spent two decades as a broadcast news producer and lived and worked for several years in Paris. She now resides in northwest Connecticut. 

Erin Byrne is author of Wings: Gifts of Art, Life, and Travel in France, editor of Vignettes & Postcards from Paris and Vignettes & Postcards from Morocco, and writer of The Storykeeper film. Awards for her work include a 2021-22 Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation, the 2020 Grand Prize Solas Award for Travel Story of the Year, three Next Generation Indie Book Awards, a Pinnacle Achievement Award, and an Accolade Award for film. Erin is host of the LitWings event series and Illuminations Salons. She has taught writing at Shakespeare and Company Bookstore in Paris, The American Library in Paris, Book Passage bookstore, and on Deep Travel trips, and is travel writing and photography curator for The Creative Process Exhibition.