About this publication
My name is Steve Scrivens. I am a British writer, theatre practitioner, and cultural essayist — and for the past twelve years, an aspiring Vermonter.
I came to the United States in my mid-fifties for reasons that didn’t outlast the first year and stayed for reasons I’m still understanding. I am leaving in my late sixties, more certain now about where I am going than I have been about anything in years. That destination is France. This publication is the record of the crossing.
Where We Start From takes its title from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “The end is where we start from.” It is a line I return to often. It captures something true about a life lived across countries and disciplines — twenty years in financial services, twenty more in theatre, and the long, strange middle passage of making sense of both. The end of one thing is always, if you are paying attention, the beginning of something else.
These essays are about Europe — its culture, its history, its unique way of being in time. They are about the art of beginning again when you are old enough to know what you are giving up, and clear enough about what you want to simply get on with it. They are about France and Britain and the places in between. About food and wine and art and the way a particular afternoon light over a particular city can make you understand why people have been writing about it for centuries. About what it means to choose, deliberately and late, the life you truly seek.
I write from Vermont, for now. I write from a life that has included the Royal & Derngate Theatre in Northampton, the back roads of New England, the theatres of London, and the taxi rank at Burlington International Airport at 3am during a blizzard. I am not a travel writer. I am not a lifestyle blogger. I am someone who has spent a long time looking carefully at things and has reached the age where silence feels like a waste.
This is a fortnightly publication. New essays arrive every other week. I welcome your responses — the conversation that forms around writing is often better than the writing itself.
If any of this sounds like something you want to read, I am glad you found your way here.
Steve Scrivens
Montpelier, Vermont
A note on what to expect
Each essay stands alone, but over time they form a larger argument — about Europe, about later life, about the particular freedom that comes from having less to lose and more to say. Some will be personal. Some will be cultural. Some will be both at once, which is where the most interesting writing tends to live.
A recent essay might begin with a meal in Lyon, or an afternoon in a Northampton rehearsal room, or a conversation at 3am on an empty Vermont road. They tend to end somewhere unexpected.
There is no agenda here beyond the writing itself. Just the essays, the readers, and whatever emerges from that exchange.
About the writer
Steve Scrivens spent twenty years in financial services and twenty years in theatre — including nearly a decade as Programming Manager at Royal & Derngate, Northampton, one of the UK’s leading producing and receiving theatres. He is currently developing a new production alongside two colleagues in the UK, work rooted in a shared commitment to bringing to the stage the voices of female artists and historic figures — women who have often been obscured by the men in their lives, or who rose above that to become towering figures in their own right. Their first production centres on the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
During the Covid pandemic he received a grant from the Vermont Council on the Arts, which led him — somewhat unexpectedly — to explore podcasting as a creative form, an experience that sharpened both his ear and his sense of what an audience actually wants from a voice they invite into their lives.
To support his artistic work, he established and runs his own taxi company in Vermont — which has given him an unexpectedly rich education in American life.
He is preparing to relocate to France in 2027.
