Notes from the Long Coast
About the notebook
My name is Ergin. I grew up between two places that both, in different ways, faced the sea: a grandmother's house near a quiet cove, and a city where the ferries were, for many of us, the first measure of the day. I studied literature, worked for some years as an editor of other people's writing, and eventually drifted — the word is exact — into the long essays and translations you will find here.
This notebook is not a magazine, though it borrows some of the furniture of one. It has no schedule I would trust you to hold me to. It has no masthead beyond my own name, no advertising, no syndication. I publish when a piece is ready, and I take a piece down if I later decide I was wrong about it. Both of these have happened.
Small-boat fishing culture, mostly. The lives of the people who work the quays — menders, auctioneers, retired captains, the women who run the chandleries and remember everyone's credit. Translations from the Turkish of letters, logbooks, and oral histories, always with the permission of the speaker or family. Occasional essays on reading, on weather, and on the particular ethics of writing about working people whose names I use.
I do not review restaurants. I do not write travel pieces in the commercial sense. I do not accept sponsored work, affiliate arrangements, or tourism board commissions of any kind, and I do not carry advertising on these pages. If you are here because a piece was shared with you, welcome; if you would like to share a piece with someone else, welcome too — that is how this notebook travels.
The site is written by hand, in a plain text editor, by me. The typefaces are set in Libre Baskerville and Work Sans. There are no trackers, no analytics, no cookies. I do not know who reads this, and I have found that I prefer it that way.
Most of what is published here was first thought or first spoken in Turkish. I translate with the assumption that a sentence has a grain, and that the translator's task is to follow the grain without pretending the wood is English. I make mistakes. When they are pointed out to me by a reader who knows better, I correct them, and I say so on the page.
Thank you for reading.
— E.A.