by Kathleen Kelly
Truth is, I only signed up for that 5K because my husband tricked me into it. Stretched across the bed, he was the picture of innocence as he watched TV and flipped through a running magazine.  I was deeply submerged in some online reading when he sent out the first ping. “There’s an [...]

by Lola Akinmade
“You this idiot man!” Seyi yells at Samson. “Why are you listening to Fashola?”
Samson is leaning in close to a parked car, listening to the governor’s latest decree about motorcycle taxis called okadas. The governor’s voice blasts from the radio through the driver’s open window, the driver himself fast asleep on his reclined [...]

by Barbara Cunliffe Singleton
TENGENENGE, VILLAGE OF STONE SCULPTURES
Zimbabwe
A cassette of Zimbabwe’s top singer, Thomas Mapfumo, vibrates the dashboard and his rhythm muffles the bumps of the last five miles. Having delivered a load of stone sculptures in Harare, Tengenenge’s driver is giving me a lift to the village of sculptors, two hours north of [...]

by Bonnie Smetts
The specter of a transatlantic flight without a book drove me into the airport bookstoreand into the unfamiliar arms of a lusty romance. With the final boarding call for my flight blaring overhead, I grabbed a book and ran to the gate. For the next twelve hours, the steamy affairs of a six-generation [...]

by Stephan Morrow
Prologue - some thoughts on traveling. looking back:
They say that Lawrence Tierney (who played the original ‘Dillinger’) had T-Rex in his genes but he was always surprising me with the things that he knew. Like quoting from yes, Emily Dickenson poems. Or like the fact that he knew about ‘The Saragossa Manuscript’ [...]

by Kathleen Spivack
For many years I was alone and I found that-but I am already putting it in past tense, please note.  So-for many years I’ve been alone and I find-what  Find that it doesn’t get any easier   Find that I’m writing my way right into another cliché  Let’s try again. As follows: For many [...]

by Tom Miller
He came to my Quito residence for dinner that equatorial night in 1982 wearing blue jeans and a recently washed button-down work shirt. I had delayed meeting the amiable white-haired Moritz Thomsen until I’d finished reading Living Poor (1969) and The Farm on the River of Emeralds (1978) , two books that had [...]

by Catherine Watson

To the end of his days, my father insisted that my travels were nothing more than “escapism.” Whenever I said I was going somewhere alone, he accused me of running away, of being “avoidant.” It didn’t matter whether it was Europe or the movies.
“What is wrong with you?” he once snarled at me [...]

by Eliot Stein

“Lake Como touches the limit of the permissibly picturesque; but Atitlán is Como with the additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It is really too much of a good thing.”
Aldus Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay, 1934
Where do we come from?
Huxley may not have realized it at the time, but when he traded in [...]

by Kevin McCaughey
I brought my ukulele on our Caribbean cruise.  Every afternoon my mother and I sang old standards in the cabin, while my father reclined on his bed, reading Robert Ludlum and wagging the book to the beat when we got to a rousing number like “Five-Foot Two.”
It was December of 2002, and my [...]