Road Scholarship: Literary Travel in the Age of Coronavirus

By Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
Perhaps home is not a place but an irrevocable condition.
-James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room.
Twenty-one years ago, I moved from Massachusetts to Spain to become a professional soccer player. I came back nine years later, a Hemingway Scholar. Retracing his steps from Chicago to Montparnasse to Madrid to Calle Obispo in Havana has been the axis of what I teach and write, and an existential foundation to just about everything else. This year my great expectations for a literary summer ended with an e-mail alert that my San Juan-Madrid flight was cancelled.
It wasn’t only a l...