There is beauty in The Long Way Home

The Long Way Home is the first South African online literary publication of its kind — reflections, poems, and letters, published on a subscription basis, for anyone who has chosen the scenic route. I grew up in a family that loved a road trip, and I was always the one asking that we take the long way, because the journey itself seemed worth having, not simply the arrival at the end of it.

I have come to believe this is true of life as well. We are not really travelling towards a fixed destination so much as accompanying one another home, and the company along the way matters rather more than the shortest route between two points. At its heart, The Long Way Home is about belonging and becoming — the sense of being untethered, and the slow, ordinary work of finding your way back to yourself, to a place, or to the people travelling alongside you. It comes together through three series, each with its own rhythm: reflections on Sundays, poems on Tuesdays, and letters on Thursdays.

It exists for readers who have felt that particular kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with a house — the ones who would rather sit with a piece of writing than scroll past it, who read slowly because slowness is the point, and who understand that arriving somewhere is never quite the same as the getting there.