“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

This is one of Ernest Hemingway’s most famous quotes on Paris, and it dons the cover of my paperback edition of A Moveable Feast. I don’t know that any quote, about any place, could speak to me with more clarity. Back in my mid-20s, after bouncing around from place to place and job to job, I somehow found myself landed in Paris. And I have never let it go.

Hemingway’s collection of essays that recollect his early life in Paris transports me in multiple ways. I think for any reader, it is the descriptions of the cobblestone streets, the smell of the bread, the sounds of the clatter and clink of café plates and silverware, that make the neighbourhoods come alive. It is the early morning mist as Hemingway walks the streets, getting ready to work. It is the glow of the streetlamps of the empty sidewalks as he meanders back to his wife and young son after a carafe of wine. It is the Hemingway delivery of those specific, sensual details that transports the reader into the ex-patriate landscape of the 1920s, a landscape of imagination and possibility and inspiration.

But for me the transport also lives on the creative side. “Hunger Was Good Discipline” and other essays like it point to the urgencies of trying to figure out how to write. Hemingway gives us his sense of self-doubt as he sits alone in the corner of a café, sharpening his pencil with a pocketknife, trying to write a good sentence. His visits to see Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of Shakespeare & Co., let us experience what it means to find a friend who encourages you in your art, to make you feel like someone out there believes in you.

I read A Moveable Feast every few months, when I want to walk along the Seine or watch the children on the carousel at Jardin des Plantes. A Moveable Feast is the warm embrace of place and craft that will always remind me of what it meant to be a young man, discovering Paris, finding my own way toward wanting to write, and how Paris, in some ways, can never change.

Nick by Michael Farris Smith, published by No Exit Press, is a prequel to F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in which Nick Carraway steps out of the shadows and into the spotlight. After experiencing the horrors of WWI, Nick embarks on a journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance – doomed from the very beginning – to the dizzying frenzy of New Orleans, eventually leading up to his meeting with the enigmatic Jay Gatsby; www.michaelfarrissmith.com.