The Writer Who Crossed an Ocean to Find a Page

I put them there. One scene per note. Each one a moment in the novel I’ve been carrying inside me — a story set in London and Toronto, about friendship over decades, and about first love, and how first love never really leaves you.

I didn’t know that was going to happen when I arrived. I came looking for time to write. What I found was something harder to name.

My name is Rajinderpal. I’ve lived across an ocean from where I was born — from India to Britain to Canada — and those crossings ended up inside my first novel. However Far Away is about migration, belonging, the quiet distances that accumulate between a person and the place they came from.

Now I’m working on a second one. Writing a novel is strange work. You can carry the whole thing inside you for years and still struggle to get the first sentence out. The noise of a city. The demands of a life. The friction between the writer you are and the writer you need to be.

My advice, if anyone asks, is simply: start. Get words on paper, even if they feel wrong. The wrong words push you toward the right ones.

But what I’d never quite had before was the right window.

StartArt gave me the window. A real one — in a sun-filled room — and I covered it in sticky notes. The novel that had been a fog became a map.

Long walks by the river. Three meals a day made with care. Uninterrupted afternoons with no one asking anything of me. And around me: artists, filmmakers, photographers, visual artists — all of us learning from each other’s process, all of us quietly making things.

“I’ve probably accomplished more in three weeks here at StartArt than I would in a few months at home.”

Not because home is bad. But because a room where nothing else is asked of you is rarer than it sounds.

On the last day, I sat in front of a mural.

Behind me on the wall, painted beside the face of Malala Yousafzai: “One child, one teacher, one pen, and one book can change the world.”

I’m not sure I had thought about why books matter in a while. The second novel had become a project, a task, a thing to be completed. Writing about first love had started to feel like work.

That day, in front of that wall, I remembered.

That’s what StartArt gives you in the end. Not just time. Not just nature. It gives you back the first love that made you start.

The sticky notes are still on the window.

StartArt Residency is open to writers, artists, and creatives of all disciplines. Stays from 7 days in Vila Verde, 40 minutes from Porto, surrounded by the forests and rivers of northern Portugal.