Light There Is to Find

It takes the eruption of a benign tumor in her fallopian tubes, a surgical procedure and the news that she can't conceive, to get Sara thinking about change. An aimless thirty-something artist, the sting of the incision on her abdomen hasn't even subsided when she decides to break up with her unstable boyfriend, Eric. With little forethought or planning, she buys a ticket to Armenia, a place she knows little about. Her goal: to visit the small town of Gyumri and complete a painting of a building she knows from a photograph on the wall in an Armenian bakery. Her other goal: to run from everyone and everything she knows, even if just for a week or so. What she intends to be a straightforward journey quickly becomes a series of hurdles-hurdles aggravated by the internal baggage she's lugged along with her. Hurdles aggravated all the more when Eric lands in the country, intent on "rescuing" Sara. To escape him, she abandons her itinerary and finds herself on a bus tour headed to the de facto state of Nagorno-Karabakh. But not even that proves far enough to escape Eric and Sara ultimately learns how difficult it is to run from your life, no matter how much credit card debt you incur to create distance, no matter how much Xanax you bring to make that distance easier to travel. Light There is to Find, a literary novel, tells the story of a single week in Sara's life. It weaves together fictive and non-fictive elements, examining what can occur when the privileged outsider attempts to understand the traumas of another culture while simultaneously trying to dodge the traumas associated with her own personal history.