I think there’s something to that idea of taking someone out of the usual street-vernacular, putting them in a totally different environment that shakes them up. And I think that’s an essential element in learning to write. You need to be shaken up. And if you look at all the great literary critics, they all talk about it in one way or another. Proust says something about to be a writer you have to become a foreigner to yourself. [Russian critic Viktor] Shklovsky talks about defamiliarization. I think in a way traveling is like taking acid, because you get on a plane and land somewhere, and the world looks like the world that you recognize and know, but there are little things that are off, that make it hyper-real and hyper-strange. For me, it was really important to tune into that strangeness. And I think that’s a process of disquieting oneself, non-pharmacologically. (Jeff Parker) More here.