Author Janice Exter Konstantinidis left the life she had created in Paso Robles and started fresh by moving to Paris in 2024, at the age of 73. She spent nearly 20 years on the Central Coast after emigrating from Australia in 2005, much of it as an active member (and later, president) of SLO NightWriters.
Known for her limericks and often tart tongue, Janice seems to have turned more reflective in this Paris chapter of her life. A new book, Vignettes: From Apple Orchards to Notre Dame, captures her mood as she navigates this Parisian life while keeping her past at bay.
We reached out to Janice to ask about her new life, the book, and the experience of being an American writer in Paris.
David Congalton: What made you move from Paso Robles to Paris? How did that come about?
Janice Exter Konstantinidis: The move was less a decision than a slow recognition—something that had been gathering in me over time. Paso Robles had been a place of both beauty and difficulty. I’d lived there many years, tending a large garden and a life that, on the surface, looked settled. But beneath that surface was a quiet urgency. I had come through a long career and a complicated marriage. Certain obligations had ended; others had simply worn thin. I found myself in a kind of waiting room—not unhappy, but no longer rooted.
Paris came to me not as a fantasy but as a possibility. I was 73 when I moved—well past the age most people would consider starting over. But I wasn’t looking to start over. I was looking to live the life I still had with more attention. And as the political landscape in the U.S. darkened, particularly with the rise of Trump and all he signified, I felt more certain in my direction. The tone of the country had shifted. The noise had grown. That sealed the decision.
I found a small apartment in the Marais, with just enough room for books, a balcony garden, and my two poodles, whom I brought with me from California. My older dog, Chloe, was almost 17 when she arrived. She enjoyed nearly a year in Paris with me. Leaving her was never going to be something I’d consider, despite her vet worrying about her travel. She was like me, determined and sassy. I knew she could do it.
It was not a dramatic escape or a grand reinvention. It was simply time. And Paris, despite its weight of history, offered me something very light: the chance to be quietly present in my own days.
DC: How was the transition for you? Was it difficult or seamless, or a little of both?
JEK: A little of both, as most true things are. There was a kind of relief in the change—something in me exhaled when I arrived. The streets felt lived-in, the buildings indifferent to performance. I didn’t come to Paris expecting ease, but I did come prepared for solitude. That helped.
Still, there were practical difficulties. The bureaucracy, the language, the slow navigation of systems that didn’t always make sense to me. And then there was the winter: sharp, gray, and freezing in a way California never was. I hadn’t quite anticipated how physical cold could become emotional. Those first months were spent bundled, cautious, listening to radiators and street sounds I didn’t yet understand. I was also unwell with bouts of bronchitis. All this was new to me.
But I had chosen this, and that made all the difference. I wasn’t trying to replicate my old life—I was letting it contract. A smaller apartment, fewer possessions, quieter routines.
Emotionally, the hardest part was the in-between—those moments when I wasn’t sure who I was without the structures I’d left behind. But even that had its purpose. I came here to live differently, not just elsewhere. And over time, the city met me halfway. I found rhythms. I found stillness. I found that the version of myself I brought here began to soften.
So no, not seamless. But not chaotic either. More like weather—passing through, settling in, learning how to move within it.
DC: I’ve never been to Paris. What am I missing?
JEK: It depends on what you’re looking for. If you want spectacle, it’s there—but Paris doesn’t insist on being admired. It isn’t loud about itself. What I’ve come to love is the way the city rewards attention rather than speed. You don’t rush through Paris. You walk. You notice the shift in light on the stone buildings. You watch an older man cross the street with his daily baguette tucked under one arm. You sit at a café not to be seen, but to observe.
There’s a grace to the city’s restraint. It holds its history quietly. Even the grandeur feels grounded. Notre-Dame, the bridges, the old wooden doors—all of it endures without fanfare. You’re aware that time is layered here, but not in a way that overwhelms. It’s more like a low hum beneath your feet.
You’re missing the smallness, in a way—the particularity. The way a whole afternoon can slip by in a square you didn’t mean to find. The way strangers speak with formality but not distance. The pleasure of a market stall with one perfect pear and no pretense.
And of course, you’re missing the imperfections too—the bureaucracy, the gray winters, the small elevators, the occasional aloofness. But even those things feel stitched into the fabric. Paris is not here to entertain you. It’s here to be itself. You either meet it where it is, or you don’t.
But if you do, and if you linger, it will begin to offer you something quiet and durable: the sense that your days have weight, even when they’re ordinary.
DC: Paris has drawn writers from around the world for decades. What’s it like to be a “writer in Paris”? Has it shaped your perspective or your writing at all?
JEK: I think there’s a mythic quality to the idea of being a writer in Paris—but the reality, for me, is quieter than the myth. I didn’t come here to chase literary ghosts or sit in cafés where someone else once wrote. I came because the city seemed to offer a kind of spaciousness—not just literal space, but interior space. A pause.
And in that pause, something in my writing shifted. I finished a memoir here, which had been years in the making. It was a deeply cathartic project; one I don’t believe I could have completed in California, let alone in Australia. There was too much proximity there, too much residue. Paris gave me the distance I needed—not to forget, but to see more clearly. To write not in reaction, but in reflection.
At the same time, I’ve been working on After the Telling, a book of quiet reckonings—solitude, memory, aging—and Paris seems to hold space for those themes. The city doesn’t require explanation or display. It allows you to move through your days a little invisibly, which is a gift when you’re writing honestly.
So yes, being here has shaped my writing. Not by giving me material, exactly, but by changing the conditions in which I listen—to memory, to feeling, to what remains unsaid. And that has made all the difference.
DC: What inspired you to write the new vignettes and put them in a book?
JEK: The vignettes began almost by accident, as small pieces of reflection written in the margins of ordinary days. They weren’t planned. I didn’t sit down with the intention of writing a book. I was trying to hold on to certain moments before they slipped away: the quality of light on a Tuesday morning, the hush of a shared room, the strange familiarity of starting over in a new country at 75.
I’ve always been drawn to the form of the vignette, its restraint, its attention to atmosphere over exposition. There’s a freedom in not having to explain everything, in letting a single scene or thought hold its own weight. The form suits the way I think and the way I remember.
Over time, I noticed a shape forming, not a linear story, but a collection of quiet reckonings. What it means to be alone, and not lonely. What remains after the noise falls away. What kinds of rooms we carry inside us.
The decision to gather them into a book—After the Telling—came slowly. I realized they were speaking to one another. That together they formed a kind of emotional archive. Not everything is tied up or explained. But there’s a throughline of attention, and a certain steadiness. I wanted to let that stand. To say “This, too, is a kind of life.”
DC: You’ve written memoir before. Are these vignettes different in terms of how you write and what you write about?
JEK: Yes, they’re different—both in form and in intention. My memoirs were written in three books: Shifting Landscapes, Worm Moon, and Out With the Washing, which were grounded in the harsh realities of my life. They moved through trauma, displacement, and survival. There was a need to speak plainly, to give shape to what had once been overwhelming. That kind of writing requires a particular clarity. It asks a great deal.
The vignettes, by contrast, are lighter—not in substance, necessarily, but in content. They don’t strive to explain. They linger. They allow room for quiet. I’ve come to love the vignette form for that very reason. It lets a moment breathe without insisting on its meaning. And I’ve found myself leaning into magical realism as well, just slightly, where time bends and memory returns in unexpected ways. There’s a kind of truth in that, too.
Rather than telling the story of my life, these new pieces reflect how I live now—what I notice, what drifts back, what rests gently rather than demands to be resolved. They’re more about presence than past. More interest in atmosphere than outcome.
DC: You definitely have an interesting life story, marked by darkness and light. Has this new approach to your writing helped you face the past?
JEK: Certainly. Writing in this way has been a freedom. After years of confronting the difficult material of my life, it’s a relief to let something more porous and reflective take shape. I’m no longer trying to explain everything. I’m simply letting it appear.
Editor’s Note: This interview was edited for length and clarity.