Oh must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

-from Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop

My brother came up with the title 'The Long Trip Home' after reading a poem from a book of Elizabeth Bishop poems when I was visiting him one weekend. The poem was called Questions of Travel, and he said, "how about this? The Long Trip Home." At the time, I had spent way too long trying to find a title for the site, and I had been hoping something would just jump out at me, something obvious and perfect.'The Long Trip Home' was it.

Deciding on a title for the site was one of the more challenging obligations we faced when deciding to create this 'online literary magazine for travelers.' I wanted something that had literary value, but I also wanted something that was recognizably about travel. After going through poems and books and quotes and even online dictionaries trying to find something, my friend Corrie suggested a title that I really liked. Unfortunately,we later found out that there were already sites online with that name, and we were back to the drawing board. It was around this time that my brother found the Elizabeth Bishop title.

If you are going to choose any author, or figure of literary importance, to take a travel writing web site's title from, Elizabeth Bishop really is as good as any, if not better. She has plenty of experience as a traveler, having spent a good part of her life in Brazil and traveling throughout the United States. Her experience as a traveler takes deep root in her poems, so her poetry becomes, in a sense, her travel journal as well.

So the title 'The Long Trip Home' was born from reading through Bishop's poems and, now, as I read the poem 'Questions of Travel' again and again, the name seems more obvious and more perfect. It's about the question that the title comes from: "Think of the long trip home./ Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?" It's about why we travel, and what travel eventually is: a trip back to where we started from. It's a question of the journey, and what significance the journey has. And it means more than this, too, but those will be things we will discover as we go.