The Debutante Ball Welcomes Bianca Turetsky

I couldn’t help but laugh when Eleanor sent me the blog topic for the week, as to say I have a love/hate relationship with nature is probably overstating the “love” part.

My fear of anything off the beaten path has become one of the main bones of contention between my California transplant boyfriend and I. He loves the Great Outdoors; I love Brooklyn. His dream vacation involves hiking up a mountain and pitching a tent; mine involves lounging by a chlorinated pool while sipping on a pink cocktail.

Living in the city for the past decade I always assumed that I wasn’t afraid of anything. It can be dangerous, it’s dirty, it smells in the summer, it’s overcrowded; it’s hard just to be here. But the reality I’m reminded of every time I step off the grid is that I’m scared of everything. Silence scares me. That twig snapping outside the window disturbing the otherwise silent night scares me. Being twenty miles from a good coffee scares me.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, for every book I write (I’m only on my second, but still there’s a pattern here) I am convinced I need to escape the city and get out into nature to really get some quality writing and thinking done. But the sad reality is that once I’ve actually arrived to “The Great Outdoors,” I realize that I’m terrified of nature and want to get on the next plane/train/bus back to Manhattan. For the next weeks I don’t sleep, I barely eat, and I don’t leave my desk. Instead I write in an anxiety induced frenzy so that I can get out of there as soon as possible and return to my normal concrete jungle existence. I get more writing done in those weeks, than in a year of slogging away at my local coffee shop in Clinton Hill. So I guess in a way I do need nature to be really productive, just not in the way most other writers — who I imagine taking long introspective walks through the woods (does that sound like an invitation for a kidnapping to anyone else?) do.

There was a time not so long ago when I had one of those embarrassingly cliche NYC moments reading the NY Times real estate section one Sunday, where I decided that I needed to move upstate and have a house with more than one room, possibly a dishwasher (luxury!), a working fireplace, and a garden. By the time I drove my rental car back to the city, white knuckled and tense while my boyfriend slept soundly in the passenger seat, (by this point I realized that I also was afraid of driving), the thought of having no neighbors in the same building, let alone on the same street seemed like a certain death, and that I had no idea how to change out storm windows, quickly squelched that romantic half-baked idea. I learnt a bit about myself that day, I am officially a city girl (sorry honey!) and I think I’m okay with that. Although I am already filling out my applications to a few rural writer’s colonies for the fall. Wish me luck!

Bianca’s whimsical debut young adult novel, The Time-Traveling Fashionista, answers the question, what if a beautiful vintage dress could take you back in time? It was called a must-read by Seventeen magazine and is filled with gorgeous full-color illustrations by fashion illustrator Sandra Suy.