The “Terra Incognita” Life of Author and Writer Coach Layne Mosler

It was the book “Driving Hungry: A Delicious Journey From Buenos Aires To New York To Berlin that led to my encounter with author and kindred spirit Layne Mosler. 

Little does she know that I’ve lived vicariously through her adventuresome ways since pouring through the chapters of her book and consider her a kindred spirit. 

Layne was raised in Southern California by a family of butchers, bakers, struggling farmers and public library aficionados.  After an overseas trip to the former Soviet Union, she caught a massive case of wanderlust which led her to study cultural anthropology. 

A random encounter with a taxi driver ignited her thirst for travel adventures, leading her to three cities — Buenos Aires, New York, and Berlin. In the former city, the Argentine capital, the cab community became her vehicle for exploring the world of culture, romance, and food. 

In her wanderings she met people from all walks of life, many of whom directed her to an eclectic array of culinary delights. Her blind encounters into the random, paradoxical nature of life fueled her decision to write Driving Hungry, a book that O, The Oprah Magazine, called “sparkling.”

Today, Layne is an author, editor, and writing coach who is passionate about helping people find their way into deeper recesses of their writing practice. In addition to having written for The Guardian, NPR Berlin, and New York magazine, she is the creator of Taxi Gourmet, an award-winning blog that’s generated media coverage in major outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC.

Curious about Layne’s nomadic ways, I inquired about what led her to eventually settle down in Berlin. She had this to say: 

“In the summer of 2010, I visited Berlin for the first time, and the sense of possibility here was electrifying. At that point, I’d spent years living and traveling in different parts of the U.S., Asia, and South America. More than any other place I’d been, Berlin felt like a city that embraced art for art’s sake.” 

Layne says that if you’re an artist in Berlin, people don’t ask whether you can make a living from your art.  Rather, they are inclined to ask about how they can participate in it, or help you with it. At the same time, she says, it’s a city that’s totally aware of the darkness of its past:

“It doesn’t hit you over the head with its history, but if you choose to look, it’s easy to see the reminders of all the terrible and remarkable things that have happened here. I still get goosebumps when I walk across the places where the Wall once stood.”

Having been introduced to Layne by way of her book “Driving Hungry,” I asked her what her journey to becoming an author was like and its significance: 

“I think every writer has a theme they come back to again and again in their writing, an idea they wrestle with over the course of their lives. One of my central themes would be finding grace in uncertainty. Not just learning how to cope with uncertainty, but learning how to revel in its possibilities.” 

Driving Hungry she says was her on-ramp for telling the story of what happened after she started hailing taxis in Buenos Aires and asking drivers to take her to their favorite places to eat. 

“At first, jumping into a random cab and not knowing where I would end up was terrifying to me. But over time, as I took the taxi adventures from Buenos Aires to New York to Berlin, I learned to look for the beauty in all those chance encounters—which led to some extraordinary food and some even more extraordinary people.”

Given the uncertainty facing our world with the cataclysmic impact of the pandemic, Layne offered this assessment of how her work as a freelancer and writer has been impacted along with the lessons she’s learned over the past 12-18 months. 

 “If anything, my writing and writing coaching work has intensified over the past year. (I am aware of how fortunate I am here since I know many people who’ve lost their jobs during the pandemic, including my husband, who drove a taxi in Berlin for 25 years.)

As an introvert, she says she naturally gravitated toward writing and is comfortable spending time by herself. But Layne admits that the pandemic has helped her understand just how much we need relationships—deep relationships. Continuing on this thought: 

“No matter how introverted we are, no matter how self-sufficient we imagine ourselves to be, we need people. We cannot draw solace and pleasure from ourselves alone (or from books alone).” 

Her practice coaching writers, says Layne, is as important to her as the writing she does. She offers this: 

“Going into my clients’ worlds, exploring what’s holding them back creatively, and helping them find the courage to tell their stories is a way for us to connect to something larger, something that goes beyond the immediate challenges we’re facing.” 

In her coaching practice, Layne primarily works with people who are completing the first drafts of their manuscripts. She adds: 

“I love the first draft phase because it’s the most playful part of the process—we have all the creative freedom we want! But the first draft phase is also the most dangerous phase in the life of a book because it’s when most writers give up.” 

She revels in working with writers on two levels:

“Besides helping them clarify their writing goals and come up with a concrete plan for reaching them, we also do a deep dive into their writing practice, their challenges, and their sources of inspiration.” 

She believes that one of the biggest mistakes people make when writing a book is in thinking their writing lives are separate from their lives as a whole noting, “Everything that happens away from the page impacts how we come to the page.”

Another mistake writers often make, she suggests, is assuming they’re not up to the task of writing a book. In other words, they look at the whole rather than the parts—and get overwhelmed by the scope. 

“Books are born out of paragraphs that become pages that become chapters. Writing a book comes down to taking small steps, over and over again. These small steps are different for every writer.” 

Finally, she adds that a lot of writers, including her, aren’t very good at acknowledging their progress while writing a book: 

“We don’t usually recognize when we’ve reached certain milestones in our manuscripts. But if we make a point of celebrating our victories during the writing process, we actually feed our creativity. Why? The more joy we allow ourselves during the process, the more we’ll want to come back to it.”  

In terms of her own writing and reading rituals, she says that writing (with black coffee) is the first thing she does in the morning, with reading being the last thing she does before turning in at night. 

“There’s no writing without reading. I love Elena Ferrante’s female characters, especially the ones in her Neapolitan Quartet. The language and depth of feeling in Garth Greenwell’s stories is breathtaking. His books are among the few I’ve taken the time to reread in the past year. I’m also a big fan of the Berlin-based poet Donna Stonecipher, whose last book is a prose poetry collection called Transaction Histories. Her writing inspires me to pay closer attention to my surroundings.”

A few months before the pandemic, she says that she started a Silent Book Club chapter here in Berlin. 

“We met once a month in a park or a café to read communally. I’m looking forward to restarting our meetings when the time is right and everyone feels safe.”

Of course, I had to ask about her favorite bookstore in Berlin? 

“St. George’s is my favorite English-language bookshop in Berlin. They have both new and used books, and everyone who works there is extremely thoughtful and knowledgeable about what’s on the shelves.”

And in terms of a preference for traditional hardback/paperback, digital books, or audiobooks, she notes: 

“Since I spend most of my days looking at a screen, I favor traditional hardback/paperback books. Though I’m starting to listen to audiobooks while walking. I’m still trying to figure out whether I retain more by listening or by reading what’s on the page.” 

Finally, I wanted the scoop on Layne’s reading list for the remainder of 2021? She closed with this: 

“My goal in 2021 is to improve my storytelling skills, so the Bible and the Hunger Games trilogy are on my list for this year, since they’re both masterpieces of storytelling in their own ways. I also want to read A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, which is basically a master class in the art of the short story. The next time I’m able to go to a museum, I want to have a better understanding of what I’m looking at, so Ways of Seeing by John Berger is also on my list. And I can’t wait to read A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, which is a retelling of the Trojan War from multiple female perspectives.”