In Paris I was trying to buy a ticket for the fast train to Angers. Interrupting, the lady at the desk rattled off something, then laughed haughtily. In fractured French,…
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Living in Thessaloniki, Greece, in the shadow of Mount Olympus, it feels only natural to claim being shot by Eros’s arrow. [Cupid only works in Italy and was unavailable –…
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A Full Irish Breakfast On our first morning at the Charleville Lodge in Dublin, I awoke to the sound of maids in the corridor. They beat pillows with dull thunks…
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I’m traveling into unknown territory with a man I just met. His name is Karl, my safari guide here in Namibia, and we’re driving along a coast shaped by death…
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Image Credit: Nsey Benajah One week out from Christmas, I am sitting in a narrow bathtub in my hotel room in Pine Mountain, Georgia. Mildew thrives in the poorly caulked…
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Our tour guide pulls over on the side of the road, a few hundred feet from a gas station. We wait inside the battered white van as a hard rain…
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Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London rises from the ground 750 feet from the original site of the theater, the one built by the Chamberlain’s Men. Its white timbered exterior glows…
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In July of 1999, I sat on a bench atop the Palatine Hill in Rome, as alone and grief-stricken as I have ever been. I was twenty-one years old, and…
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Place names often sound to me like incantations. If the whole world can be conjured by shapes drawn and labeled on a map, then this world is surely the result…
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I arrived in Rome at the end of a hot June, to study Italian for a month the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I hadn’t brought…
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Featured photo — “a city through a jungle” — from author Katie Simpson. Each night my dad made the same toast: “to another day in paradise.” Our glasses clinked as we…
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Creative Nonfiction / EssayCultureFeaturedPhotographyTravelMemories of a Summer Crossing–over the border to the present
I. I crossed the Canadian border in mid-June. The border agent peered at me as I explained that I was going to Horsefly to visit some friends. He told me…
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Dawn casts mountain waves on the small window above my bed. Once the sun rises, the sierra will look so sharp you can count the trees on it, now it’s…
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The train is hot. I’m reading Susan Blumberg Kason’s memoir, The Good Chinese Wife, on my Kindle. A woman I don’t know across from me asks if she can use…