fbpx

Books And Travel

Escape, Curiosity, Inspiration

The Geography of Belonging: Finding Home With Catriona Turner

Inner Travel, Podcast / by / 1 Comment

Tweet
Pin
Share
Share
0 Shares

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | Email | TuneIn | RSS

What does home mean when you are always moving on? What does belonging mean when your address changes every few years? And how do we reconcile our evolving identities with the places we’ve left behind? Catriona Turner talks about her travels from Scotland to France, to Congo and Uganda, and back home again over 14 years, and how she has redefined what she calls home.

For more episodes on home, check out my solo episode on Sanctuary, Retreat, Belonging: The Importance of Home in Difficult Times; and for more on Third Culture Kids, check out the interview on Djibouti with Rachel Pieh Jones. You can also find more about my thoughts on home in my memoir, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways.

Catriona Turner

Catriona Turner is the Scottish author of Nest, A Memoir of Home on the Move.

  • Life in Kampala, Uganda – discovering an unexpectedly cosmopolitan city with thriving coffee and food scenes
  • Experiencing the Republic of Congo – navigating life in Pointe-Noire, a Francophone oil city with strong French influences
  • The challenges of living in transition – the struggle between temporary mindset and embracing the present moment
  • Unpacking the loaded terms ‘expat’ and ‘immigrant’ — privilege, cultural integration, and identity
  • The evolution of “home” – from a fixed geographical location to a multidimensional concept that travels with you
  • How children experience third culture living
  • Repatriation challenges – seeing your own culture through new eyes after years abroad
  • Unexpected appreciations – discovering the beauty of Scotland through foreigners’ perspectives
  • Book recommendations for understanding global living, going home, and repatriation

You can find Catriona at CatrionaTurner.com and her book, Nest, on Amazon.

Transcript of the interview:

Jo: Hello Travelers. I am Jo Frances (J.F.) Penn, and today I’m here with Catriona Turner. Hi Katrina.Catriona: Hi. So happy to be here.Jo: It’s great to have you on the show. Catriona is the Scottish author of Nest, A Memoir of Home on the Move, which we are talking about today.

Tell us a bit about why you left Scotland 14 plus years ago and some of the places that you’ve lived.

Catriona: Yeah. Coming up for 16 years ago that we left in 2009 and that was because of my husband’s job. So we had met a couple years before and it was always kinda on the cards that his company might ask him to be globally mobile.

So when the opportunity came up, we did, I had been teaching for 10 years and I was happy to kind of take a career break to move to Southern France for three years, because who wouldn’t?

Jo: Yeah, for sure.

Catriona: — on the company Dollar and off we went. We got married about the same time and 14 years later, we came back having, by then moved to Uganda and back to France and the Republic of Congo and Denmark, and then back to France.

One more time in Paris before we came back, yeah. Coming up for two years ago now we’re back in Aberdeen, in the northeast of Scotland, which was where we left from.

Jo: And with two kids.

Catriona: Two kids that joined us along the way.

Jo: Well, it’s interesting and I wanted to talk to you ’cause although we lived in different places, I left England in 2000 and returned in 2011.

So I was away 11 years and no children so I understand the sort of being away longer, but let’s go back. ’cause I mean, depending on who’s listening, but the South of France, I mean obviously there’s the language, but I feel like —

Congo and Uganda were probably a much bigger culture shock. So tell us about those countries. I mean, most people never have visited. What did you love about them and what was amazing?

Catriona: Well, I mean, they’re two really different countries, so, Uganda in particular. So that was my first experience of like being out of Europe, living somewhere completely different. But really the quality of life there was incredible.

In the end, we were only there for a year, or I was only there for a year, my husband was there a bit longer, so we didn’t fully take advantage of it but Kampala is this incredibly cosmopolitan city actually. It’s relatively very developed, great coffee scene, great food scene.

There are people living there from all over the world because it’s like a real hub for the region. Kampala, well the time we were there, I mean, still relatively stable country compared to some of the countries around about it. So a lot of NGOs have a big base in that part of the world. , the World Bank, there’s like big organizations and big companies that are based in Kampala, so it’s a really lively city, relatively developed.

We ate so well. I got really hooked on Ugandan coffee. I know you love coffee. Like East African people know East African coffee. They know Kenyan. They maybe know Rwandan/Ethiopian coffee of course. But Ugandan coffee is what I’m always searching for. Now it’s not exported as much.

But yeah, I stopped breastfeeding at that time and got back into coffee in a big way. And the travel, of living, in Uganda, we were in the city but having gone from somebody who thought that safari would be something I would do, once in a lifetime, you know, something you would do when you retire to then living somewhere, you could go and do it on a weekend.

And we did it on several weekends. It was just a little mini break, well a big mini break ’cause it was five hours of driving across,

Jo: but it’s easier than me visiting you in Aberdeen from down here in Bath.

Catriona: Well, yeah. Oh, definitely, But it was a shorter drive than that. And yeah, we had amazing Safari weekends well, that,

Jo: I mean, that can, sounds pretty, pretty idyllic in Uganda, but obviously the Congo is more known for civil war and, not being a safe, stable country.

How was it living in the Congo?

Catriona: We were living in the Republic of Congo. So not the DRC, not the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is where there’s serious problems.

Republic of Congo or what people often call Congo-Brazzaville is much more stable, for good or ill, I won’t get into the politics of the country, but it’s stable. And not as interesting, I would say to live in as Uganda where you can have easy travel.

The tourism in Congo not as developed. We had a good life there, like in many ways, and people, I think a lot of people imagine living somewhere like that as being very confined to sort of compound living and my husband previously had worked in Nigeria on rotation, and that had been his experience, just kind of getting driven in and out of a compound to go to work as opposed to in Congo where we lived in an apartment complex owned by the company, but the town was really quiet.

We could walk around, we could go to the beach, we could walk to the shops and restaurants and very French feeling to me, and I would tell I had a lot of French friends living there, and yeah, there’s a few English speaking people living there, but because the country is so largely French speaking, you really have to be able to speak French to live and work there.

So most of my friends are French, and I would say to them, oh, it feels so French here. And they would say, no, it’s not, it’s Africa. But relatively, the French influence is still very strong. So we had French supermarkets, french restaurants, French patisseries.

Jo: It’s an ex-French colony, right?

Catriona: Yes.

Jo: And look, I mean —

Colonialism is a difficult topic, but I always feel like people just assume that it’s always a British colony, whereas of course, Sub-Saharan Africa, there’s French, there’s Portuguese, there’s German influence down there as well, wasn’t there?

Catriona: Yeah. Yeah. We went to Namibia

Jo: Very German.

Catriona: Yeah. Yeah. I think probably most people wouldn’t realize how how vast of an area is considered francophone. Africa is so many countries that are still, where the main language or the official language is French, where the currency is still linked to the Franc. Still kind of linked to French economics. And it’s the franc that is the currency across a lot of African countries still, which is fascinating.

Jo: And so, I mean obviously you had young kids as well, so —

What were the challenges of living in these countries at that time for you?

Catriona: The challenges of living in countries like that? Like, I’m moving all the time. I think that’s more the challenge.

You know, we were well looked after and we were living in stable places on the whole Uganda that I had some personal challenges because at the time there was, in 2014, there was a big anti-gay anti homosexuality bill that was going through parliament. There was an anti pornography law that was going through Parliament that caused a lot of problems with, it became known as the Miniskirt Law because women were being targeted for dressing in a certain way.

And so, there was instability, at least in the values and the misaligned values, I guess is how I would describe it when I was living there. And I was only there for a year, so I didn’t really have to think too deeply about it because I knew in the back of my mind, well, we’ll be leaving.

And so I don’t have to think too deeply about this. You know, I have a baby and a toddler and I’ll just get on with things. Yeah. But in Congo is much more, it just stable from that point of view.

But, the challenges for me were more that —

It’s that challenge of feeling like you don’t have to engage too much because it’s temporary, but then you’re never really living your life in the moment because you’re thinking, ‘oh, I can leave.’

My next place, my next move will be something more. You know, I’ll do it right next time.

So, that was the turning point that came for me eventually, was to realize that that was how I was living, that being in transition all the time. I still had to find a sense of living my life in the moment and not letting that temporary nature of it hold me back from doing things.

Jo:  It’s really interesting in the book, ’cause you used the word expat — short for expatriate — which I always find interesting.

And we’ve talked on this show before about third culture [See Djibouti interview with Rachel Pieh Jones] and briefly when I, with my mom and brother lived in Malawi, also Sub-Saharan Africa back in the eighties, we would you say we were expats, but then when I lived in New Zealand for like seven years, and Australia for five years, I never used the word expat.

And I was wondering what do these words kind of mean for you and like —

When do we use the word expat or when do we use the term third culture compared to immigrant? These words are so difficult and expat in particular has some real connotations.

Catriona: Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s heavy with connotation, that word.

And to begin with, when I started writing and I was blogging and writing about this idea of living in transition and, I really completely avoided the word expat because I was writing about living in different countries and travel, and I thought that that was a serious thing that I was doing and that the connotations of expat of privilege and comfort and perhaps living in a bubble, I thought, well, I’m doing things differently. That’s not me.

And as I wrote though about the particular experience of having the privilege and the challenges, I realized that there wasn’t really another word. That kind of encapsulated all that. And I started to embrace it because that way I was finding the people who could read what I was writing and connect with them.

And increasingly now, I just use it as carefully as I can. I was a serial expat, and that’s the word, the phrase I would use for myself, my own experience, because I was never settling in one place.

And in contrast to people who have to make a life for themselves in a new country, they have to integrate in some way, or they have to negotiate the terms of the host culture, the expectations that they have of what integration looks like, or, I couldn’t do that really, not in the same way I could experience a new culture in a new country, but I couldn’t really integrate.

And so that in itself is a luxury of not having to negotiate that cultural negotiation. But it’s also a challenge because you don’t necessarily feel that you are finding your place in a new country.

So that’s why the term expat resonates for me, for one of a better one, let’s say. And I think, it’s an ongoing conversation that, that people are having in the third culture space. Because, because of the connotations, because of , the racial overtones as well, you know, because some people,

Jo: Is it mainly used for white people?

Catriona: That’s definitely a perception that people have, and my experience is that it’s used. Well, I mean, it’s a technical term. It’s on paper. It’s a contractual thing,

Jo: and as in you are not, you don’t have a right to live here. You are just here for this job or whatever. Yes. Temporary. You don’t really, I mean, you obviously have the rights that as according to you by that, and your husband’s contract was protecting your situation, but as soon as that was over, you were gone.

Catriona: Right. And you’re not going through an immigration process. And if you went to that country’s government and said, actually, I want to immigrate here, then everything would change.

Jo: oh, okay. That’s really interesting. ’cause I went to Australia and New Zealand on a visa and then, and then applied for citizenship in New Zealand and Australia. I was on a working visa. So it’s like that in itself. As you say, even a legal definition is interesting.

Catriona: Yes. Yes. And, I think it’s really important to challenge these terms and question them. I think it’s really important for white people to call themselves immigrants when they’re immigrants, and I know lots of people from the global south who call themselves expats because they’re expats, and, you know, are claiming that term.

Jo: I think that’s so important. And, well, my husband is a New Zealander, he’s an immigrant here in the UK. And my sister-in-law’s Canadian. She’s an immigrant, and my other sister-in-law is Nigerian. She’s an immigrant.

So I agree. The words, words can be used for different people, but I think it’s interesting to talk about them, as you said, you used to avoid these words because they were difficult.

I like talking about those. But let’s come to the word home since we’re talking about difficult words.

Your book is Nest, A memoir of Home on the Move and you talk a lot in the book about what the hell is home anyway.

And it was funny ’cause you said your husband will use the word home when returning to a hotel room like that you’ve never even been to. And I’m exactly the same, which I thought was quite funny, whereas you were uncomfortable with that.

How did your idea of home shift over time?

Catriona: I talked about how, when we first met, he would say, yeah, on holiday, shall we go home? meaning a hotel room. And I thought that was so strange.

Home was like two places, the place where I grew up, and then the place where I had moved to and was living. It was a physical thing, a geographical thing.

I had left my hometown and moved to Aberdeen for university and then chosen that as my home, like that had really become part of my identity that I had done that. And that was a place where I belonged and I felt it kind of belonged to me.

And then so when we moved away for, as I thought at the time, three years, and I would say to people, oh, we’ll be going back home. You know, we’ll go home and, and that’s still a place that’s important to me and I’ll still belong there.

And people would say to me, oh, you know what, no, give it five years.

You change. You can’t go back. You can never go back.

People would actually say that because talking about this idea of how the experience changes you, and actually I was so terrified of the idea that I would no longer have that identity of that place being home for me.

That was one of the reasons why I really found it hard to, sort of fully embrace being in a particular place. I sort of held places a bit of a distance because I had this idea of home, but then I realized that I was living this temporary life. I was kind of always waiting for, waiting to the go to the next place or waiting to return.

The kind of arrival fallacy of, you know, when we get there, that’ll be my life properly. If you’re doing that, as it turns out for two years here, three years there, and a year somewhere else, eventually it becomes a decade and that that is your life.

I realized I had to feel at home anywhere.

So I was kinda gradually learning that home could be with people, home could be many places, and home does feel like many places now but even more importantly, a sense of home inside me that I could take anywhere by reconnecting with things that were, in my core, things that were important to me, one of those turned out to be writing, so that I was coming kind of home to myself in a way.

Now I’m back home, but when we moved to Paris in 2021, having lived in France twice before and having lived in Congo as well and living that sort of francophone lifestyle, returning to, even though I’d never lived in Paris before moving, there also felt like a homecoming because of the frenchness.

So that home can be multitudes and it can be something we carry with us as well and I think, I hope that’s something that’s universal in my memoir because I do think, I actually think that almost all memoir, not biography, but memoir —

The core of our memoir story is coming home to who you really are.

Jo: Sometimes multiple times.

Catriona; Yes. Well, definitely. I mean, having, having kind of gone through that one on a kind of large global scale, if you like, and then written that story, I realized that I can go back to other times in my life and and sort of see that I’ve told that, told myself that story before.

Jo: And I wonder if what we mean is — when we use the term home — is comfort. Comfort or being comfortable. And so when we feel at home in ourselves, it’s now because we are comfortable in ourselves. And that before we felt somehow discombobulated in some way. And so that can happen in different places.

Like where I am now, I was born in Somerset, in England, and I never ever thought I would return to Somerset. Bath is not where I was born, but you know, it’s quite a big county. But being in Bath where I am and I’d gone to school in Bristol and having traveled a lot myself, I also was like, this is kind of weird to be doing this.

And yet it wasn’t home until the pandemic and then because we had to be here and I had to walk around and around and around, and then I was like, oh, maybe this is home.

[Check out my solo episode: Sanctuary, Retreat, Belonging: The Importance of Home in Difficult Times]

Catriona: Yes, there’s an element to which Denmark is really home for me as well because of the pandemic, we were there. We were there when and when it started and it really grounded, like literally grounded us.

It was the only time we had, like in 2020 was the only year we ever spent like within the borders of one country from start to finish. We did a big road trip. Denmark was very relaxed during the pandemic and we did actually do a big road trip of the country that summer.

Jo: That was gorgeous, a gorgeous summer.

Catriona: Yeah, it was, it was such a summer. Last year I went back to Denmark for a visit and I was really overwhelmed actually, by the feeling of being back home. The place in particular where we had lived, but also in Copenhagen, which we’d visited a lot, and I have friends now, writer friends, and yeah, it also felt like going home and so I just say I’m going home all the time.

A couple of weeks ago, I went back to the place where I grew up on the other side of Scotland for a visit, and that was home. And then I said, oh, we’ll go home now and home to Aberdeen. So, I mean, I was saying that to myself 30 years ago when I went to university. I had two homes and now yeah, I could be saying, I’m going home.

And I did, in fact a couple of weeks ago, say that I, I heard myself say it to my kids. We were staying in a rental flat and I said, oh, should we go home?

Jo: And you meant that and, well this is interesting because again —

Having been a child in Africa, and your kids obviously grown up all over the place, do you feel that they have a very different view?

Than you, or do you feel like perhaps you’ve moved towards them, what attitudes they’ve naturally grown up with, which is this moving around kind of sense, and that you’ve learnt to be that way as an adult, whereas maybe they’ve just grown up that way.

Catriona: Yeah, it’s interesting. My older son just turned 14, so, they’re obviously in, still in transition. They’re becoming different versions of themselves all the time.

And they really asked to come home. To come home. To come back here, which had never been home for them. We had always kind of imagined that we would come back for secondary school here.

Jo: That’s why my mum came back too, so I could go to secondary school.

Catriona: Yeah, I mean, I obviously grew up in the same town all my life and, and I, I wanted to give them an experience of that consistency. So they could decide for themselves, how that would be. But even a couple of years before we came back, they were saying, oh, when will we get to live in Scotland?

And one of the reasons that they were able to say that I think is ’cause we had bought a house here while we were away, because before that they weren’t quite sure. Oh, okay, if when they were little they would say they were French ’cause they spoke French, or then they would might, they might say they were English ’cause they also spoke English. English.

Jo: They’re so lucky. Do they know how lucky they are?

Catriona: I feel that, I feel we tell ’em all the time. So they, yeah. They know it up here. I dunno if they know it in here. But they definitely know it.

Jo: They might later on in their lives. I mean, they’re too young to really realize it.

Well, let’s talk about you actually coming back to Aberdeen then — the challenge of repatriation. I saw on your Instagram you put some quotes, you said before that somebody said “you can never go back.”

How is repatriation now you’re back, because of course Aberdeen is a very different city than you left and you are a different person too?

Catriona: Yeah. I think it’s more the bigger changes in me than the place. Having kind of stepped away from the big changes, having stepped away from my own culture and then seeing it, coming out of the water as it were.

There’s this metaphor, the story of the two little fish swimming along two young fish and then an older fish comes along and, and swims past and says, ‘Hey, kids, how’s the water,’ then swims away?

And then the one fish says to the other, ‘what’s water?’

Because, yeah, that’s a good analogy for our culture. We don’t see it really until we’re either step away from it or we’re forced to. And so I’ve spent a long time kind of uncovering my Britishness and my Scottishness, the things that I always thought were normal, just normal default things.

And then you move away and you discover that they’re just British and Scottish quirks. And then what you realize is you can kind of pick and choose from the things that you just were automatically doing and becoming.

You can let go of things and you can take on different things and different influences from different cultures.

You mentioned Third Culture earlier, which we didn’t really get into, but the idea of not being tied to one place. That’s a cultural part of me now as well. It’s the idea once you’ve moved abroad and lived abroad, you realize you can do anything actually.

And then you get addicted to the idea of doing new things and adventure. There definitely was a time for about two years we were preparing to return. And I was all for it. I was really looking forward to being in one place for a while and not having to pack again, but then I was also thinking, well, you know, if they just offered us one more just for a couple of years, maybe we could do another adventure.

So I think now I have much more of the mindset of I can kind of try anything, do anything. And I think sometimes that will make me stand out a little bit here, but that’s, that’s okay because the thing about midlife as well as you know, is that’s a coming home as well and realizing a different, a different way that all the decades of like fitting in with other people’s expectations of yourself, you don’t need to do that anymore.

Jo: Be left behind.

I mean it’s interesting, you mentioned there seeing your own culture from the outside. I also feel having been away 11 years. Yes, there’s things wrong with the UK and with England and with Scotland and there are always problems in every single country.

But when I hear people moaning so much all the time about everything that’s wrong, I mean, that is a national pastime. Obviously moaning about stuff, but, I’m like, seriously —

Until you live somewhere else, you don’t necessarily appreciate all the amazing things about your country.

So what are the things that you are now like, oh yeah, this is great. This is so Scottish, or this is so British.

Catriona: Yeah, it’s funny because, yeah, I had that this morning. Exactly. I got a Tesco delivery and the first thing was complaining about the weather and, and you were like —

Jo: but look, I got a delivery!

Catriona: Yes, exactly. And then, you know, what, what are you up to today? I said, oh, I got some work to do. Oh dear. I’m thinking, no, I love working. What are you talking about? What fascinated me living abroad and meeting people who had been to Scotland. Well, first of all, when you say you’re from Scotland, everyone knows what that means.

It’s a brilliant thing to be able to say around the world that you’re Scottish. Everyone loves it. Everyone loves that.

But so many people who I met who’d lived here. Like 99.9% of them loved living here, especially in Aberdeen, which surprised me to begin with. There were the few that just were like, no, I couldn’t cope with the weather which is fair enough. But everyone else absolutely loved it.

And the reasons were the countryside. And Aberdeen is this very livable city. It has universities and has a lot of industry, but it’s a kind of small city as well. It’s very livable and you can get out to the Cairngorms within an hour.

And realizing that people from other parts of the world don’t see that kind of rolling hills and green countryside, they don’t see the history and the culture. Yes. I was speaking to a Canadian friend the other day who absolutely loves the theater that we have and how accessible it is, and she said, it’s so cheap.

And I thought, I don’t think it’s cheap, but like compared to a small town in Canada or a similar size of town in Canada, we have big theater companies that tour here. We have lots of local theater as well, so yeah, I appreciate all that. Where I live, I can walk pretty much everywhere I want to go, and I love that.

Jo: I love the architecture!

Catriona: Yeah. The architecture and the history of that. Aberdeen’s, the granite city. It’s all built of granite. So people talk about it being gray, but it’s not. It’s sparkles, it’s silver, and when the sun shines, which it does relatively actually quite a lot here. So I’m really enjoying all of that.

I’ll tell you one little thing that most British people would not appreciate is the Royal Mail and the postal system. Yes. Which I suppose might not be what it used to be, but it’s still much more reliable, much more accessible than almost anywhere else. Well, anywhere else I’ve lived.

And they put it through your door in this country. Like you would never realize it until you left. That is an absolute luxury. Nowhere else I’ve lived. Do you have a letter box in your front door and the postie comes and puts your mail right into your home? You don’t even have to step out your door.

Jo: And now you’re saying that I’m remembering going to the post office with a box and everything when we were in Malawi? So that, yeah, so you had to go somewhere else.

Catriona: But even in France and Denmark, the mailbox was at the end of the drive or the bottom of the building. You still had to kind of go get, collect it, get it.

Jo: That’s probably true in a lot of America as well. I, I guess. I think so, but it’s interesting.

Well, I think we could talk about this all day, but I did want to ask you, since this is the books and travel show. Apart from your own book Nest —

Books about home expats third culture

What are a few books that you recommend either about home or expat life or third culture?

Catriona: Well you said third culture, so I better reference Third Culture Kids, where the term came from. I think it’s Ruth Van Reken and David Pollock, who really described in detail the experience of this idea of children, particularly children growing up away from their home culture, not fully part of their host culture, therefore, part of a third culture, so that’s a really useful, it’s almost like a manual for helping kids grow up with that.

Another memoir that I really love, by my friend Dina Honour, It’s a Lot to Unpack. She was a New Yorker who followed her English husband to move first to London and then across Europe, and she writes really, really insightfully about giving up identity as particularly for her as a New Yorker and as an independent woman to follow her husband’s career, and the implications of that.

If you want some fiction, there’s this book, The Guilty Can’t Say Goodbye, which is a thriller, kind of domestic thriller by Mariam Navaid Ottimofiore who is a Pakistani German Italian writer and expat, very third culture. She’s from Pakistan. Her husband is German Italian, so she has at least one of those citizenships as well. Currently lives in Portugal, and so that’s a novel set in an around an international school in Portugal with women from very diverse backgrounds coming together and uncovering the secrets in their past. So if you like to read about, even if you like to learn about lifestyle through fiction, that’s a really good one as well.

One more really useful book, um, particular about repatriation is called The Art of Coming Home by Craig Storti. Fantastic. I read that before we moved back and I found it really useful

Jo: ’cause people just assume, oh, it’s gonna be fine when you’re just going back. But there’s so many challenges.

I also felt, and it’s funny actually, I was just thinking as you were talking there, I think when we left London to move to Bath, that was actually quite a culture shock in itself. Having lived in London for a number of years and then moving basically more to the sticks that actually I was about six months of struggling and wanting to go back.

And actually that was probably a form of repatriation in a way, into a different kind of life. You know what I mean? Maybe you got that when you moved, like from Kampala back to somewhere that wasn’t so cosmopolitan.

Catriona: Yeah.

Jo: It can happen. Right?

Catriona: I, I mean, I think we’re all going through that. Well, most of us go through that at some point, and I actually wrote an essay recently about the culture shock I had when I first moved from one side of Scotland to the other. And the differences I was so aware of.

Jo: You are writing another book, aren’t you?

Catriona: Yeah. I’m very slowly working on a repatriation memoir, so it’s kind of in real times as it happens. I’m writing pieces about that, that hopefully will become, well, not hopefully, I’ll make it happen.

Jo: It will will happen. But in the meantime, people can get your book Nest: A Memoir of Home on the Move. There it is.

Where can people find the book and you and everything you do online?

Catriona: My website is CatrionaTurner.com and on Instagram, I’m CatrionaTurnerBooks.

And if you want to get a taster of the story of Nest, I actually did a TEDx talk back in November, and that’s available on YouTube. It’s called Find Your Main Character Energy. It’s about language and identity, but it kind of ended up being a bit of a the book in a nutshell.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Catriona. That was great.

Catriona: Well, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honour.

Tweet
Pin
Share
Share
0 Shares

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Follow Jo Frances Penn

© Copyright Jo Frances Penn. All rights reserved.