Like many, Frances Webb loves to travel, but as a writer, she is always open to inspiration for a story or narrative poem. The spark might come from a locale or an architectural feature. It may come from an interaction or incident. “Things happen when you travel,” Webb says. “You meet people, you observe things, there is always something going on.” 

Roamers and Wanderers is Webb’s collection of short stories and poetry written over a period of 40 years. As with her previous anthology, The Memoir Man: And Others in Public Places (2019), travel plays a primary role. In the story “Remembering Caracas,” for example, Webb quotes prose by Robert Louis Stevenson that is engraved on the floor in the waiting area of a train station in Providence, Rhode Island: “For my part I travel not to go anywhere, but travel to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

Webb, who lives outside of Philadelphia in Jenkinville, Pennsylvania, grew up in northern New Jersey in a house built by her grandfather in the late 19th century. Hers was not a literary household. “There were lots of books around,” she says with a laugh. “Nobody read them.” The antiquated tomes belonged to her grandparents.

But a picture book that she read when she was 3 years old called Junket is Nice by Dorothy Kunhardt fascinated her. In seventh grade, she read Silas Marner. “It blew my mind,” she says. That sparked her interest in writing, which was fanned by “excellent, encouraging teachers.”

A graduate of Columbia University School of the Arts, Webb taught English as a second language at a New York community college for nearly two decades. During that entire time, she worked on a novel, Innocence and Gold Dust, while juggling her career and parenthood. She retired in 1992 and has been writing full-time ever since. Her work has appeared in the literary journals the Antioch Review, the Iowa Review, the Literary Review, and the Northwest Review.

In 2016, Webb published a second historical novel, Come to a Memory: Joab’s Story/Lila’s Story, which is set in 1939 and deals with prejudice in its coming-of-age story about an unexpected friendship that develops between two social outcasts, a fourth grade New Jersey girl and a new classmate, a half-Jewish refugee and concentration camp survivor. Kirkus praises Webb’s “strong characters” and her indelible creation of “a unique American family, as idiosyncratic, in its own way, as the one in Kaufman and Hart’s play You Can’t Take It With You.”

Ironically for stories in which travel sets the stage, Webb says she does not begin writing with a destination in mind. She will not embark on her literary journeys without three elements: “a voice, a feeling, and a sentence.” Only then, she says, will she set a story in motion.

Noting Webb’s crisp, casual style, Kirkussays of Roamers and Wanderers that readers will find “plenty of detail and emotional complexity” in Webb’s “cursory tales and vignettes, with their close attention to detail and lack of resolution.”

The collection’s first story, “Markers,” is told by a woman on her honeymoon. Her husband is intent on walking a Civil War battlefield where his great-grandfather fought. Webb captures an underlying tension and festering discontent with her domineering new spouse’s slights in spare declarative sentences in the style of Ernest Hemingway, whom she cites (along with Eudora Welty) as an influence:

We walked back to the car, got in, and drove on. Harold drove slowly past [a] historical marker and asked me to read it to him.

“At this spot, on April 2, 1702, Jonathan Bird encountered and successfully fought a section of the Ninth Brigade….”

There was a car behind us, so I stopped reading so Harold would speed up.

“You didn’t finish,” he said.

“I did the best I could.”

“The Convention” revisits the same couple years later and describes an increasingly awkward business dinner with another couple, which ends in an act of rebellion that hints the marriage may be approaching the end of its shelf life.

“Whatever happens, happens,” Webb explains of her writing process. “I don’t plan ahead of time. I don’t tell myself what kind of a story this is going to be. I never know exactly…how it will turn out. I prefer that the character tell his or her own story and leave [the outcome to] the reader’s imagination.” 

Nor does she have a strategy for dealing with writer’s block. “I wait until it eases,” she says. “I can try (to get unblocked). I’ve forced myself with fast typing or writing gibberish to get myself going, but I find I just have to wade through.” Has she ever put a stalled story aside to start another? “Lots of times,” she replies with a laugh. 

When it comes to her novels, Webb immerses herself in research. For the historical novel Innocence and Gold Dust, she spent time in Turkey absorbing the Roman culture to tell the story of a real-life slave who rose to a position of prominence in the empire. 

Webb is currently working on something that is in its embryonic stages, she says. “I don’t know what it will be. It can’t be labeled.” Until then, she enjoys seeing her earlier stories collected in Roamers and Wanderers. “They all feel like new to me.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer.