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,…
travel
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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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Creative Nonfiction / Essay
Literacy Narrative: In Search of Dumplings and Dead Poets
by Guest Contributor February 22, 2018Shakespeare’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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Creative Nonfiction / Essay
A Fig in Wintertime by Stephanie McCarter
by Guest Contributor January 11, 2018In 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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Creative Nonfiction / EssayCultureFeatured
Literacy Narrative: Losing the Kingdom
by Thomas Dai September 28, 2017Place 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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ConversationCultureIntrospectionOpinionTravel
The Trouble with Paradise
by Guest Contributor March 21, 2017Featured 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 / EssayCultureFeaturedPhotographyTravel
Memories of a Summer Crossing–over the border to the present
by Grace Forrest November 30, 2016I. 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…