I have lived in what feels like a little bit of everywhere. But “home,” for me, is the road. Stretched out before me like poetry, the highway is also, conveniently, where some of the most unexpected poems emerge.
The author, left, and her sister, Nana Fofie Amina Bashir, standing next to their father’s car circa 1980.
I come from wanderers, nomads, and the long-displaced. Born under Somali skies that stretched so wide it was hard not to fall into them, my Pops carries the rhythm of moving across the land in his blood. So do I. Pops taught me that the road itself is both journey and destination. When I was growing up, Pops remained infatuated with the vast landscape the highway affords. He traded camels and lorries for minivans and creased road atlases origami’d into the corners of a glove compartment.
When I was a kid we crisscrossed the country more times than I can count—packed into the car with our suitcases, snacks, and the same Paula Abdul album that convinced us kids that our parents did not understand how the CD player worked. Trips were never just trips; they were expeditions—for kin, for discovery, for the sheer joy of passing through somewhere else. I became the family navigator. Surveyor of endless summers, I flipped through tattered maps to decode road signs like ancient runes. As our wheels spun the cadence of the horizon, I felt alive, a part of the machine of the earth itself.
Pops taught us that you can’t truly learn a place, its people, or yourself if you fly over everything that lies between point A and point B.
That philosophy stuck. I inherited his restless rhythms and his affinity for perpetual motion. I couldn’t wait to get my license, dragging my mother out of work early on the day I turned sixteen to become a certified, bona fide, Motor City–adjacent driver. I mean, like, legally, unlike before. Driving didn’t just move me—it transformed me. The wheel was my liberation, my way to step into the world and make it my own.
A finely tuned affinitive cartography inspires my love of editing and revision; it keeps me open to the unexpected. My built-in sense of direction, lovingly tended over a lifetime of reading signs and geolocating myself on the codex grid, serves me well.
Residencies, workshops, conferences, and gigs have me mazing through the airport churn and wanded for metal. And though my work requires constant movement, logging me thousands of air miles every year, I remain my father’s child: a nomad, tethered to earth no matter how high I fly.
Airplanes might get us where we’re going faster, but flying is a kind of forgetting. A skipping-over. A way of arriving without ever truly leaving that skips over the world, reducing towns and rivers to distant blurs. The road gives me something flying never can: the gift of presence, the chance to feel every mile, to carry the weight of the journey with me. Driving insists on presence. It demands that you pass through, witness, and let the road write itself into you. When I drive, ideas bubble up the way they refuse to when I’m sitting in an airport terminal or staring at a screen on the seatback in front of me. Lines click into rhythm.
I’ll tell you something I’ve never been able to explain to someone who doesn’t love the road: Driving is my own special poetic medium. Last summer I drove from New York to Florida and—ill-advisedly—back, burning beneath one heat vortex after another. I’ve written entire pieces in my head while driving. This one started somewhere on the road in a red state in Trumplandia and swam in my head as I watched news of the Trump rally shooting from a stool at a hotel bar.
As an artist and writer who forever works to wring magic from (mis)adventure, I relish the time and space to process my travels. Rather than simply arriving within hours, I have to cross the actual physical space between where I’ve been and where I’m going. I cherish this time as a kind of artistic reset, especially before or after an intense period of creativity. The clarity that comes from hours on the road is unmatched, and I often show up at my destination with a renewed sense of focus and purpose.
“On the way” can be a long-time thing. I was on the way to Florida for about a week. That 100-degree-plus slog through the burning eastern coast began long before the first thought of packing and extended far beyond arrival at my destination. That first evening on the road I somehow fit in stops at a party, a workshop, and a New York Liberty basketball game, before pulling over for the night in Maryland for a visit with a favorite auntie.
Driving is a true poet’s practice; it forces attention. The highway, in its vastness and unpredictability, becomes my collaborator and my muse. I listen for the poem shaped into a sudden turn, or in the lilt of a highway sign. Questions I’ve been wrestling with find answers in the quiet space of the drive. Details you might skim past at 33,000 feet come alive when you’re on the ground, windows rolled down, taking it all in. The world gently unfurls itself. The tilt of a grain silo against a steel-gray sky. A hand-painted sign for pecan pie at a roadside diner. There’s a kind of holiness in these moments. A reminder that poetry doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it’s a shadow that crosses your path, a bird gliding low over the highway. Sometimes it’s the way the light bends at dusk, turning everything gold for just a heartbeat.
My poetics have always been embodied and rooted in movement. I write best when surrounded by a hint of chaos, a busy bar or café where the world shifts around me and lets my mind roam free. While one of the gifts of the road experience is the solitude and relief from distraction, I’m also an old-school road-trip girlie. I love what a pair of travelers or more can find and make together on a journey. I once gave a new friend a ride back from MacDowell to New York City, and those hours were among the most precious we spent of the weeks we lived together.
I drive like I make poems: to feel alive and in the world, to move with its rhythms and hums, and to make something worthy—indeed, perhaps, even helpful—out of the static and the silence and the noise. I drive because the land that holds our stories stretches wide enough to carry both memory and possibility. There is a poetry to passing through versus flying over. Just the other day I took a photo of the snowy expanse of southwest Michigan from an airplane window seat. We sailed the south end of the state in less than an hour, reducing whole worlds to a blur. How much was I missing between here and there?
On the road, a giant blinking billboard announces that JESUS SAVES; about a mile later, a smaller, yellower sign warns me to BEWARE OF SNAKES. The contrast is poetry—a juxtapositional bedlam that sparks the imagination. The road is full of these strange, fleeting scenes that stick with me, haunt me, until I write them down: a stretch of barren desert broken by a single flowering cactus; truck-stop cacophonies, like the one where I waited with a coterie of poets and writers for our tallyho to one residency or another, our laughter echoing against the pumps.
The road is not just a means of transportation; it is a sanctuary, a studio, and a space for discovery. There’s poetry in the way headlights carve a path out of the dark one yellow arc at a time.
There’s also a freedom in being unreachable. Twenty-first-century life demands constant connection—texts, e-mails, pings, and notifications—but the road offers something rare: not the absence of sound, but the absence of demand. The highway doesn’t ask anything of me except to keep moving. It’s one of the few places outside of sleep where I can unplug completely. Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road: no multitasking, only the present moment.
Disconnection, like poetry, is not a luxury; it’s essential. I don’t even like to talk on the phone while I drive. Without the constant pull of screens, my mind has room to wander, to daydream, to create. The road becomes a kind of refuge where the only voices are the ones I choose to hear, and the only signal I am chasing is the one that tells me I’ve gone far enough or that I’ve found something worth stopping for.
I drive because it’s how I make sense of the world—passing through it, seeing it up close, letting it mark me. The road becomes my writing partner and coconspirator; the land unspools like a long, untamed stanza, and I follow its rhythm. The landscape speaks metaphor: a barn sags under an indifferent sky, a mountain’s jagged edge cuts through the clouds, Topeka shimmers its emerald relief like a mirage in the ceaseless plains. Distractions fade, and the passing scenery fuels the imagination with every passing mile.
Poetry spills across the highway as if from a tipped inkwell. It announces itself in the loneliness of a single white cross on the roadside, the staccato light through wind turbines as they bend a setting sun against the wind, and the fleeting glimpses of other lives through open car windows. Poetry often resides in the unexpected, and the highway is full of it. Inspiration doesn’t always arrive with the big moments. It’s often bundled into the interstitial cracks between those long stretches of road where nothing much seems to happen, but Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” comes on the radio and feels like prophecy.
The possibility of creating explodes from even the most mundane moments—say, the sunset glare my visor can’t block, which transforms dust into magic, can spark imagination. Each journey is like a fresh draft, each mile a new line. Let the airlines own the sharp caesura of destination. When I drive I hold the keys to my present. I need no permission. I have no wait. Gotta go? Gotta go. The palm trees of Hancock Park, the storm-soaked bridges that stretch across the Willamette River, and the expanse of Michigan farmland write themselves into me anew with each pass.
And, sure, there may be a few outlaw moments when I evade a pull-over with such Smokey and the Bandit-ian alacrity that it chafes there’s no pics for proof. (You wouldn’t believe what happened!)
On the road, listening is an immersive experience. Audiobooks and podcasts keep me company across deserts and over mountain passes. Favorite readers’ familiar voices weave themselves into the fabric of the passing moments. There’s something about hearing a narrative unfold as the landscape becomes a part of the story that amplifies the power of language.
One summer I stuttered my way through two years of Italian language study in twelve coast-to-coast weeks, repeating phrases out loud to the rhythm of the interstate: Come si dice? Dove posso trovare? I spent the hours crossing the plains, letting new words roll themselves smooth as stone in my mouth. By Baltimore, I could ask for directions and order coffee in Rome, though what happened when someone actually answered me in Italian left a lot essere desiderato.
But I’m not on the road without music; it gives the road a pulse. I honor the impulse to turn off the audiobook or the podcast and tune in to a beat or bad-mouth an aria. Sometimes the best way to find poetry is to roll down the windows, turn up the music, and let the highway guide you. The right song at the right moment can change the shape of a drive, just like the right line can change the shape of a poem.
Once, I G-funked my way across Colorado as the bassline synced up with the white dotted line. When the day stretches too long, it’s probably time for some Prince. I’ve felt Nina Simone’s contralto stretch time to let a hard rain stop so the road once again opened wide. A lyric can pull me back into an old memory or push me forward into an idea I hadn’t considered. The occasional exclamation of a passing train invites me to slow down, tune out, tune in, and surrender to the beauty of motion and the particularity of place. I drive because I’m a nomad, because movement is in my blood. I drive because I am my father’s daughter. Because the act of passing through a place, of feeling its edges and textures, is as important as arriving. And because, like my father, I know the journey is just as important as where we’re going.
You’d imagine that the road would teach me how to sit in silence, but no. I do get to hear the space between thoughts, though, where an idea stretches itself out, twists and turns, and settles into its true shape. Even the most mundane moments carry poetry. The loud tension of a long line of cars stuck behind a slow-moving truck, or a rest stop at dusk, its smell of fresh diesel in the air, blurring the world into a tapestry of abstracted colors and shapes.
It’s fitting, then, that I’m finishing this meditation aboard an Airbus A321. My seat is broken, and I can barely see the rain outside of my neighbor’s window. Airlines can keep their waddling security lines, their helter-skelter schedules, and their thoughts and prayers that my overstuffed bags will arrive when I do.
On the road I am both traveler and destination. The journey itself is a metaphor for life—curves and straightaways, unexpected exits, and open horizons.
No matter where I’m coming from or wherever I’m headed, the road is where I remember myself. Somewhere out there, I know, too, that there’s a poem waiting for me. I intend to find it.
On the Road: Seven Practical Tips to Cultivate Creativity
When you find yourself feeling stuck, just try this: Get in the car. Don’t worry about where you’re going. Just go. With each mile, let the world outside transform you.
- Pack snacks: This is something I always struggle with. Road food has no interest in being healthy, but a body must eat. Let Past You be a friend to Future You by stocking up on goodies for the road so you don’t get gas-station gaslit into something that will only lead to restroom detours.
- Bring a notebook (and pens that actually work): I’ve tried every manner of audio recording on the road, all to great failure. My most poetic soundscapes can become just road noise. I don’t mean this figuratively. Keep a notebook—or at least a stack of receipts—within reach. Inspiration strikes when it strikes. Ideas come fast and leave faster on the road, and you don’t want to lose them. Rest stops become spontaneous writing retreats. Even a quick note jotted down at a rest stop can become the seed of a poem, story, or essay.
- Embrace the voice memo: Talk to yourself. Warning (see No. 2): You’ll likely need to pull over for this—for safety as well as quality of recording. Recording your thoughts aloud can save a line or image that might otherwise slip away. Speaking your ideas can also help clarify them.
- Love the landscape: Pay attention to the details of the world around you. The color of the sky at sunset, the texture of the pavement, the shapes of the trees—all sources of inspiration.
- Stack your soundtrack: And download it! Have a solid plate of hits available for when streaming hits its inevitable dead space. These dead spaces often tend to pair with landscapes that will put you to sleep. These are the moments you can really—clears throat in Leontyne Price, in Mahalia Jackson, in Whitney nem—sing! Download audiobook selections as well as your music. Story has a way of seeping into the scenery.
- Stop for all the small stuff: On the road, you’re on your time, no one else’s. Pull over for roadside attractions, weird diners, and scenic overlooks. These moments of pause can also provide fresh perspectives and recharge your creative energy.
- Trust the journey: Let the road take you somewhere unexpected. Creativity flourishes in the detours.
Samiya Bashir is the author of four poetry collections, including Field Theories (Nightboat Books, 2017), winner of the Oregon Book Award. Her newest, I Hope This Helps, is out this spring from Nightboat. A sought-after editor, Bashir currently serves as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University.
