The Other Worlds of Glastonbury

Fairy wings flutter in the audience as the “burlesque fairy” at the front of the room blows kisses of green glitter. In the crowd are pirates, flower fairies, and even geishas as well as aficionados of Steam Punk style (think Victorian in goggles a lá Jules Verne). A man in moon boots and a woman in a tutu are dressed all in white with strands of blue LED lights. In a corner, two mermaids are combing their long tresses, flapping their tails, and showing the few children in the room their treasure box of shells. The band comes on, the blonde lead singer in black leather opening with an Irish jig that gets the crowd moving, and then switching to hard rock that keeps them dancing until the clock strikes midnight. Welcome to the sold-out Avalon Faery Ball of 2012 in Glastonbury.

A mid-sized English town, west of London, in the Somerset Levels on the Salisbury Plain, Glastonbury is best known for its eponymous music festival. Every other summer, thousands of young people Keep on reading....

© Judith Pierce Rosenberg, 2013. Used with permission. Judith is the author of A Swedish Kitchen: Recipes and Reminiscences, winner of a Gourmand Cookbook Award (Hippocrene Books) and now available as an Amazon ebook.

A Train Ride to Provo

At age 23, like many in his generation at the depths of the Great Depression, John A. Palmer, "packing a toothbrush and razor in the lapel pocket of my jacket and armed with the clothes on my back and a pack of cigarettes," hit the road, heading west. He had $7. Palmer's memoir, A Walk to Somewhere, relates the adventure that ensued. In the book's introduction, written when he was a very old man, Palmer noted: "...the Depression engendered a diversity of feelings; among them, frustration at our inability to advance and succeed. An ever-increasing lack of opportunity in our country, together with the ever-present picture of abject poverty and despair, presented a scenario which we were ill-prepared to accept. Our 'walk' was more a journey to understand what happened to our dreams." In the edited excerpt which follows, Palmer tells how, when faced with crossing the Rocky Mountains, he and two companions hopped a train outside of Laramie, Wyoming.

Off we went into the night, lurching and rumbling and jerking. The beginning of the trip wasn't too bad, and we amused ourselves by huddling in one corner of the gondola, lying about our various road experiences. At times, wearying of that game, we withdrew into our individual reveries and, as all good conversationalists do, respected the silent interludes, interrupting them only to comment on a shooting star or to mutter an oath upon a particularly inconsiderate lurch of the train. The weather became less balmy as the train climbed higher and higher.

I guess it was the last reverie that awakened me to the situation I was in because my breath exhaled like a spout from a steam kettle. The rumbling and jerking of the gondola underscored that this was no carefree ride ending in the relative comfort of a warm tent on the ocean sands. As we climbed higher and higher, my companions and I started to jog up and down in the empty gondola Keep on reading....

© John A. Palmer, 1993. Used with permission. A Walk to Somewhere is published by Vision Books International.

Chilling Out in Stockholm

Judith Pierce Rosenberg, author of the award-winning cooking memoir, A Swedish Kitchen, spent summers at the edge of the Swedish archipelago when her children were young. Journeying back to Stockholm, she checks out an unusual, and rather chilly, nightspot.

Each winter, deep in the boreal forests of northern Sweden, a hotel is built anew, all of ice. Reindeer hides cover the ice beds, where guests are ensconced in down sleeping bags. There is even a wedding chapel, akin the Snow Queen's palace in Hans Christian Andersen's tale. Or so I imagine, for the touch of frostbite I got at the Norwegian Olympics in 1992 has left me with little inclination to sleep on ice, no matter how well insulated.

However, I was still curious, so I did the next best thing and visited the Ice Bar in downtown Stockholm.

“Your feet will freeze,” the attendant said with a laugh, looking down at my sandals. The weather in Stockholm was unusually warm, 80 degrees and no wind, practically sweltering by Swedish standards. But we were about to leave all that behind, as my 26-year-old daughter and I pulled on blue hooded ponchos that hung below our knees with attached gloves - but no foot coverings.

Nonetheless, we walked through the double doors. About a dozen people were standing around, including a group of women from Southern California. The room lived up to its name: the bar was made of ice; the shelves behind were ice; there were blocks of ice topped with reindeer Keep on reading....

© Judith Pierce Rosenberg, 2012. Judith is the author of A Swedish Kitchen: Recipes and Reminiscences, winner of a Gourmand Cookbook Award (Hippocrene Books). Her earlier non-fiction book, A Question of Balance (Papier-Maché) profiles contemporary writers and artists who have successfully faced the challenges of combining creative careers with motherhood.

Souvenirs

Novelist Margaret C. Murray returned in December from a journey to South Africa. The things she brought back will not fit in any backpack or suitcase.

I just returned from a trip to South Africa with my two sons. I wish I could do it over again, not to change anything or do it differently, but because I still want to be there. So today I'm bringing back Africa.

First, I'm bringing back tolerance for myself. I'm really talking about bringing back if you will,  the tolerance – the forgiveness – shown by South Africans I met, a freedom and lightness I saw in their eyes. It was everywhere – in the malls we stopped at, the restaurants we ate at, in the small stores in Ladysmith and Durban. Often I was asked where I came from. When I answered “United States,” or “California,” I was asked if I minded being hugged. Of course not! I love being hugged! “If I could only put my foot in America once,” I heard one young grocery clerk say.

I visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, a work of art and monument to “Life by Skin Color,” a different life for each. As you enter the museum, you randomly pick a ticket that identifies you as “white,” “coloured” or “black.” Then you go through the door that matches your ticket. A few years ago, while teaching English composition to college students, I had shown the movie, Invictus, about South Africa's dismantling of apartheid during the 1995 Rugby Cup. The movie title is taken from a Victorian poem meaning “Unconquered,” which Nelson Mandela committed to heart while in prison. My one visit to the Apartheid Museum taught me so much more about his vision of democracy for all.

It was amazing to see so much faith and tolerance in light of South Africa's legacy of apartheid, colonization, imperialism, and slave trafficking by people of every color and background. And this terrible legacy is amplified by the present AIDS/HIV epidemic.

Still, I'm bringing back happiness, the feeling you had as a child, the kind that makes you laugh at anything, like when you turn the corner and come upon a group of six young African maids in crisp, laundered uniforms at the foot of the stairs in a Polokwane hotel. They laugh aloud when you tell them they look pretty, and say you look pretty, too, making tears come to your own eyes then and whenever you remember that hot morning, that corner of the stairs, those lovely faces laughing with you.

I'm bringing back peace too from Africa – the peace that happens when there is nothing you have to do except watch a hippo slowly walk across the sand, one huge foot at a time, and slowly lower itself into the Letaba River. The hippo will stay submerged in the cool water  like this all day with only its two round humps of eyes showing and you can stay too, just watching, just being there, watching hippo eyes.

And awe, the majestic sensation of watching a pride of lions saunter Keep on reading....

© Margaret C. Murray, 2012. Used with permission. Margaret C. Murray is the author of Sundagger.net . Her new novel, Dreamers, is a coming-of-age love story set in the Sixties (WriteWords Press, 2011). 

A Cowtown Hula

On a visit to Hawaii's Big Island during a recent recession, Shelley Buck learns it's not necessary to buy  a luau show ticket in order to experience the hula.

Forget the bare lava fields, palm trees, and rain forest. On a flattish area of the Big Island of Hawaii, just to the northwest of mist-shrouded Mauna Kea volcano, lies a world no traveler who hasn't been there could anticipate. There's rangeland. Red cattle with white faces are scattered over golden spreading meadows, their noses down, chewing the rich island landscape. And there are cowboys. Cowboys who hula?

The region's Parker Ranch, on land granted to an American settler by Hawaii's King Kamehameha I, has been operating since 1847. Cowboys have been on the land throughout its history. Local residents call them paniolo, a name that comes from hispanolo, the term used to describe the skilled horsemen from Mexico who initially trained Hawaiian ranch workers in roping, riding, and cattle handling.

But do they hula too? To find out, I've come to the premier cowtown in the Big Island's ranching region, to watch a hula society perform. Dancers from Tahiti are appearing. I spotted an announcement for this dance on a bulletin board yesterday while munching on a slice of pizza and waiting for a sluicing downpour to ease up.

So today, I've come back up from Waikoloa, where I'm staying, amid the lava floes and petroglyphs on the Kohala Coast. On the coast, tropical paradises have been created specially for well-heeled tourists. Although the Tahitian dancers will be doing a show over there tonight, I would rather drive the twenty miles to watch them in this rural town. I have a hunch that the festivities here will be less formal and more lively. Keep on reading....

© Shelley Buck, 2011. Used with permission. Shelley Buck is the author of Floating Point, a memoir of living on a boat just off Silicon Valley during the millennial technology boom.

A Great Start in Venice

Finally they were in Venice. They stayed in a small room in Hotel Flora close to Piazza San Marco. Despite being in an alleyway, the room was intimate and charming, with a huge bed and its own bathroom. They had access to a little garden, a small enclosed oasis in the built up quarter.

Only minutes away were the piazza, the Grand Canal, and little cafes and restaurants. The characteristic small bridges crossing over smaller waterways looked like the backs of fighting cats, arching up in the middle. The gondolas were everywhere, and the Vaporetto station and Doge's Palace were next door. The row of little shops where her new place would be opening was close as well. It was an ideal setting Keep on reading....

© Mitzi Penzes, 2011. Used with permission. Author Mitzi Penzes grew up in Hungary, where she trained and practiced as a neurologist before coming to the United States. Now an entrepreneur, she lives with her family and cat in Napa, California.

Chasing Karma/Teaching Tibetans

In the year 2000, novelist Jacob Sackin taught English in Dharamsala, a village in the Himalayan foothills where the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, and many refugees from Tibet have settled. In these excerpts, parts of a longer essay, Sackin chronicles vivid and bittersweet moments as exiles and a new generation of young Tibetans confront both their roots and their expectations from the West.

Dharamsala, India – Today is the anniversary of the Buddha's enlightenment and good deeds are worth 10,000 times more good karma, so everyone in town is giving lots of money to the dozens of Indian beggars who have come up from the surrounding towns. The banks ran out of one and two rupee coins because the Tibetans wanted to give to as many beggars as possible.

An Israeli woman at the bar was trying to rescue the insects with cupped hands as they crawled up the candle toward the flame. I think I also have been chasing karma lately. I notice myself searching for good deeds, carrying wood for an old monk or letting a short Tibetan woman stand in front of me during the Dalai Lama's teaching, but then not moving for a western woman the next day. I bought a bag of rice for an Indian boy I always see begging on my street and now every time he sees me he tugs on my shirt and asks for money. Some of the Westerners give the beggars money, but others yell at them to get out of the way.

* * *

Last night I heard an old monk talk at the community center who was in prison for twenty-seven years in Tibet. He said that he chewed bones just to exercise his teeth and ate insects like  chocolate. He was forced to Keep on reading....

© July, 2004 by Jacob Sackin. Used with permission. Sackin is the author of the young adult novels Iglu (2011) and Islands.  He lives in Northern California. Sackin's full essay is posted on Google Docs.

Swept Away in Felton, California

On Father's Day, Shelley Buck discovers an exotic destination may sometimes lie quite close to home.

“Write about a cultural stretch,” the instructor in my TEFL* program had told me, raising fantasies about dining on lamb's eyes or chocolate-covered crickets at some exotic San Francisco eatery. But since it was Father's Day, and the choice of restaurant was not my call, I wound up being towed along by the hero of the day for a dollop of Italy in Felton, California.

Felton is best known for its steam railroad, a pretty good health food store with a mural on the side, and a couple of small shops which sell attractive crystals, if you happen to want some. I don't.

I should add that Felton also boasts three of the six traffic lights in our unincorporated valley. It's no Metropolis, but down the road, near the turn-off for the state park with the really big redwoods, there's this Italian restaurant, set a bit back from the highway. It's not Italy, but it is, after all, in the San Lorenzo Valley, which sounds a little Italian, if you're making a vigorous cultural stretch.

“It won't count for the assignment,” I thought. An American Italian restaurant out here at the edge of the continent would not be ethnic enough. The only cultural stretch here would be the big tab; I'm not used to expensive restaurants. And what about my low-cholesterol diet? 

I was telling myself all this as we were seated - my son, husband, and I - inside on the blond curved-back chairs, at a table with a sheet of butcher paper flung across a mustard-colored table cloth in a restaurant only a  seven miles from home.

“Not Italy,” I was whispering silently as I watched the other diners in their white plastic chairs among market umbrellas in the spreading garden below us, the fading sunlight in the garden gilding their hair. And I was still sure when the blond waitress, all in white, brought our menu, with the word organic prominently displayed on it.

Beyond the ochre-plastered counter which separated us from the kitchen, I could see the cook: He had blue eyes. A ponytail held back reddish hair the color of Thomas Jefferson's as he maneuvered pans with intensity at a stove surface just out of sight beyond a makeshift work island. “Italian restaurant, ha!” I said to myself in derision.

My son confirmed the impression: “You can't see the stove because he has a hidden microwave back there - a giant one,” he mocked. He wasn't going to be seduced by any carefully crafted atmosphere. Nor was I, on Father's Day, this most American of holidays. OK, it was a nice restaurant, close to home, but Italy, it wasn't.

And then someone called the cook “Lucca.” Keep on reading....

*TEFL=Teaching of English as a Foreign Language © Shelley Buck, 2004. Used with permission. Shelley Buck is the author of Floating Point, a memoir of living on a boat just off Silicon Valley during the millennial technology boom. A paperback edition is due out in July, 2011. She holds a certificate in TESL/TEFL from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Road Trip into Death Valley

In Margaret Murray's novel, Sundagger.net, six New Age seekers journey to Death Valley in a cramped VW bus, together with their sweat lodge leader. The group's intent is to hold a Native American vision quest, once there. In this excerpt, the mostly-urban travelers encounter a wild land of fierce winds and disorienting geological trompe l'oeil.

The wind was coming up. Rowan fumed as the bus slid all over the road. They passed ragged chocolate mountains forming a ridge around a lake of dried mud and the beehive furnaces he remembered from his trip to the TPC/IP conference in Palm Springs last spring.

“It's a mirage! A what-do-you-call it, oasis!” squeaked Tracine. She spit out sunflower seeds into a paper trash bag, annoying him.

“The land slopes from east to west going below a sea that disappeared eons ago,” Anna read from the guidebook. Torn rubber tires littered the side of the road like wings from giant crows.

“Where are we?” Dan asked.

“The only signs I see now are minus elevation signs. This much below sea level. This much. The numbers get bigger and bigger,” said Tracine.

Finally they reached Furnace Creek.

“This is ninety. That's minus ninety feet elevation,” Dan marveled.

They all got out at the Furnace Creek General Store. Ten minutes later, Dan and Rowan came back with candy, chips, soft drinks, and more beer in brown paper bags. Jim bought bags of Doritos chips while Anna returned with Calistoga Water. They all had to wait for Tracine to get her curly fries.

Now Stonekeeper insisted on driving, so Rowan exchanged places with Two Crows, who moved to the front seat.

“The only fish in the river are fossils,” read Anna as Stonekeeper drove the van over a small bridge above a river of pink and gray sand.

They passed a sign, Something River. Tufts of dried plant life emerged from tiny cracks in the dry arroyo, hinting of spring.

“The only river I see is a river of dark stones on a gray bed,” said Tracine.

“It was a sea,” read Anna. “Camels roamed right here, mastodons.”

Two Crows pointed out a solitary gray butte shrouded in haze, the blue horizon like smoke. “That's where we're Keep on reading....

Used with permission. Copyright 2008 by Margaret Murray. Her new novel, Dreamers, is due out September 15.

Off the Trail: Walden Pond

Author and conservationist Ron Strickland is perhaps best known for his role in establishing the Pacific Northwest Trail. This excerpt is from his latest book, Pathfinder: Blazing a New Wilderness Trail in Modern America, due out May 1. In it, Strickland describes an "outlaw expedition" to Walden Pond in Massachusetts, the site where transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau built his famous cabin in 1845 as an experiment in living simply.

I met Tine, then-39, the old-fashioned way, via the Internet. Actually I was looking for a backpacking partner with whom to explore the Sea-To-Sea Route. Instead I found a 4-star hotel maven whose interest in trails was minimal but whose tolerance for me was both unexpected and very welcome. She and I had both been hitched before and had a sense of the compromises inherent in marriage. So forsaking thirty years of nomadism, I decided to propose to her on Valentines Day at Walden Pond, home of my hero Henry David Thoreau.

Since a proposal is one of the few acts in life for which there is little or no guidance, I mass-E-mailed my friends for advice. The resulting hilarity showed that many people doubted that marriage was part of my vocabulary. Their suggestions ranged from the quaint (hide the ring in a snowman) to the literary (read aloud to her from Thoreau’s Journals.) My recently-divorced buddy Keith Clark wrote from Anchorage to warn, “I got married on Valentines Day. Don't do that. Hard to get dinner reservations every year, and now, it really sucks as a remembrance.”

“Bah humbug, to you, Keith,” I thought. However, on V-Day, fate intervened with the winter’s most hellacious snowstorm. Blowing every which way, the blizzard convinced Tine that travel was too dangerous. That coincided with my learning that Walden Pond was not the bucolic retreat popularized by my hero Henry D. Actually it was a state park with 9-5 hours and zillions of recreationists who were prohibited from parking anywhere but in the $5 lot that closed at 5 PM. So Valentines Day was out. However, the next evening Mr. Romantic decided to lead an outlaw expedition in the dark to declare his love. Keep on reading....

From Pathfinder: Blazing a New Wilderness Trail in Modern America by Ron Strickland, published by Oregon State University Press, 2011. Excerpted with permission from the publisher. More information about the book is available from: http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press/o-p/Pathfinder.html

Aloft on Google Earth

Flying doesn't require wings or strings, as Shelley Buck found out on this nano-voyage to her childhood home. Follow her on Twitter: @ShelleyBuck

You can go home again. I don't very often. I wasn't that fond of growing up in the boxy Washington, D.C. suburbs. When I was there, I was always burning to be somewhere else: India,  Japan, Hawaii, Cambridge,  (never New York, but that's perhaps because I already had an aunt there and it was known territory). Even Washington, D.C., across the bridge, where the drinking age was 18, was a steady lure.

After I moved to the West Coast, going back to Falls Church never topped the list of wanna-be destinations. My parents had moved away, and I associated the place with anguished teen years.

And then I discovered Google Earth. Now, swooping in on the map, like a lost girl traveling on wires in a Peter Pan stage show, I can fly to my childhood house. I can visit anytime. I can peer at the roof and yard, see what cars are parked on the street. I feel I'm digitally right at the window, though unable to quite Keep on reading....

The Language of Boats

Shelley Buck had to tackle an ancient and very foreign language as she searched for a boat to live on. This excerpt is from her 2010 eBook, Floating Point, which chronicles her move to the water as a means to shorten an awful commute. The book is due out in paperback in 2011.

"Go see Phil," the harbormaster instructed. "Phil is a yacht broker who can help you." Dutifully, I copied down his directions for finding Phil.

Before  confronting Phil, I went home to study up on yacht brokers. I was running out of marinas to scope out and did not want to blow our chances of getting a berth by appearing ignorant. I learned that yacht brokers are people who buy and sell boats. Yacht brokers do not sell—or even talk about—Alviso specials or rattletrap wooden-hulled clunkers. Instead, they publish tantalizing lists of sleek modern vessels for sale. They buy advertisements in magazines just like the ones real estate people use to sell houses. Every marina except Alviso seemed to have its own yacht broker and racks for these free magazines. I brought a lot of them home. My husband and I pored over the tiny pictures and read the captions as we ate a late, post-commute, dinner.

The captions were an introduction to a new language: bristol seemed to mean a boat was in good shape; classic generally meant it was not. There were sailboats and trawlers and cruisers with pilothouses and trunk cabins. We read of salons, and staterooms, and galleys, boats with vee berths, boats with settees, transoms and swim platforms and davits to hang a little boat off your big boat, and heads, meaning toilets. Canvas, when it didn't refer to the material a sail was made of, generally meant that some part of the boat was enclosed or covered with fabric, kind of like a tent at summer camp. There were high and low steering stations, which meant some were outdoors (high) and some were indoors (low). Engines were gas or diesel or missing.

Reading on, after my husband left for work at dawn, I learned Keep on reading....

Surfing Santa

Margaret Murray, author of the upcoming novel, Dreamers. relates an encounter with a mythic figure at the ocean's edge. (And no, it is not a shark.)

Surfing Santa on Capitola Beach? "No way," you say? But yes! Well, sort of. Santa actually arrived in a long, narrow canoe in the rolling surf just south of Santa Cruz, California. True to character, Santa came right on time, the Saturday after Thanksgiving at noon--in sync with the famed Macy's Parade through New York's Times Square.

My granddaughters, my friend, and I stood in the rain along with at least a hundred other people, two-thirds of whom were under five years old. Emma and Sophie, ages three and six, were exuberant, if hesitant, about his arrival, but I was not. Santa still fills me with excitement just as he did when I was five, waiting in line to sit on his lap at Kaufmann's Department Store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

We all stood inches from the crashing surf in the soft November rain looking into the gray misty horizon for signs of him: Is that Santa? No, it's a brown pelican swooping through the bobbing grebes. Is someone waving out there? It's Santa! Is he really surfing? The boat looks so tiny. Here he comes!

Santa and his stalwart crew of five jumped out of the narrow canoe (about the width of a kayak) onto the wet sand. He wore a red and white Hawaiian shirt over his wet suit. Keep on reading....

Centrifugal Travel

In this selection from her new book, Floating Point: Endlessly Rocking off Silicon Valley, Shelley Buck tells how the decision was made to move to a boat by Silicon Valley.

We didn't start out intending to set up housekeeping on a boat. It was June. We had had our own business, but it was closed. We had lived eight years in our inland suburb, with its large lawns and neighborhood schools. But suddenly it seemed that everything we wanted or needed wasn't there.

And then there was the commute.

Finding an engineering job wasn't difficult for Lee, but the commute to and from it was hell. Sometimes it took him an hour and forty-five minutes to get home in the evening. There were near-accidents. Outside San Jose, where four lanes of indifferently-maintained, pocked, jammed freeway telescoped into two, traffic often ground to a halt. He could see the other commuters in their cars, grim-faced, on their cell phones, calling home: “Honey, I'll be late, again.”

Our company, with its mercifully short commute, was gone. Perhaps it was time to travel on.

Lee and I had both loved to travel when we were young, but our jobs as adults had forced us to scale back. Where once we had circled the globe on a shoestring, more recently we had been pulled into a tighter orbit, like small asteroids snagged by powerful gravitational fields. For years, we had circled San Francisco and Silicon Valley, pausing to live awhile at various points along the loop. We had opted to whirl around the rim, rather than settle amid the bright lights of crowded city centers. I had come to think of our progression of moves as centrifugal travel. As we roved, the force of our desire to explore new places had offset the centripetal pull of the urban centers, keeping us, like the U.S.S.R.'s Sputnik, firmly aloft and in orbit.

One morning at breakfast, I spotted an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle classified section: “35 foot boat, $15,000.”

“Why commute, when you can... Keep on reading....

Not a Bird

In this excerpt from his novel, Chameleon, John Joss describes the ascent of Mt. Patterson, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains—by sailplane.

Mount Patterson consumes my attention. I should not have come up, a ‘climber without ropes’-an earlier decision, a modest task. My instructor said, years ago: “Don't go into the mountains alone. If you do, you may regret it.”

If I don't master this lump of Sierra Nevada granite, I might...die. I discard the thought. I have trained for years, mastered the tests from beginner to advanced. Then, freedom. Now...fear.

From a distance, this chunk of the Sierra—its nature mostly hidden by peripheral rock outcrops, lesser foothills—seemed benign. Up close, its character is revealed: relentless, uncaring of my intrusion. Keep on reading....

Icarus

In this selection from her travel memoir, East, Shelley Buck recalls her first flight across the Atlantic.

The plane out of Los Angeles was packed with returning Scottish tourists. We were all bound for tiny Stansted Airport, outside London. I nestled into my seat, fastening my seatbelt.The upholstery felt scratchy, but that was OK. I was on my way. I tried to talk to my seatmate, but it was difficult. Although we both spoke English, we could not understand one another. I gathered generally that she had been to visit her grandchildren in Los Angeles and was now going home. We took off, and as the plane gained altitude, I looked down at the hills beneath us, still green with winter’s rain. I thought, “I’m going to miss a California summer.”

The plane sped on. Somewhere over upstate New York, a passenger arose. Stiff and robotlike, the man lurched up the aisle and attempted to pry open the door to the pilot’s cabin. Keep on reading....

Uluru

In this excerpt from his novel, Simia, John Joss describes the dawn at Ayers Rock, held sacred by aboriginal people in Australia as Uluru. An inselberg is a monolithic mountain or rock formation arising from a surrounding plain.

The instant he turned off the engine, the Outback's immense silence seeped back to engulf them. He got down without a word, followed by the other two.

The sound of slamming doors seemed sacrilege in the stillness surrounding them. Three pairs of night-adapted eyes turned west in unison toward the inselberg just becoming visible through the gloom, ten miles away to the west across the scrub-covered desert floor.

The bulk of it assaulted the mind, though the newcomers could only guess at its full extent. In the gray pre-dawn darkness, it too was gray, but in subtle contrast to the sky, like the immense curved back of some indescribably large, subterranean whale, as if it were leaping up and breaking the surface of the desert floor, reaching for air and light from the depths of the earth. Keep on reading....

Tea and Sweet Potatoes

Food writer Judith Pierce Rosenberg unexpectedly finds a sweet potato restaurant in Kyoto.

In one of the most elegant and minimalist shopping plazas in Kyoto, a city of elegant and minimalist Zen architecture, a city known for its tea shops serving mochi, traditional sweet rice cakes, is Chaimon, a restaurant devoted to tea (cha) and sweet potatoes (imon).

My twenty-something daughter, Tina, and I were visiting Kyoto when we happened upon Chaimon. As soon we stepped inside, we noticed the two piles of sweet potatoes Keep on reading....

Pittsburgh

Novelist Margaret Murray evokes a well-known place, envisioned in memory, in this excerpt from her upcoming novel, Dreamers.

I had my own dream and it began in Pittsburgh, the city where I was born and grew up.

What was it like to grow up then? Rivers and hills surrounded me. Hills were everywhere, hills were Pittsburgh, hills and rivers and bridges crossing them, and the great green trees bowing beneath the haze of summer sunlight, the cobwebs and mazes of bare branched trees in winter, fronting a backdrop of smog and flames from the steel mills, still operating in the '50s and '60s. Pittsburgh housed all the neighborhoods of Europe, the Near East and Russia in miniature, one nationality predominant on each hill and each hollow, and you could find your own country from any one of 56 bridges.

When I ran beneath the old elm and maple trees of Schenley Park and Frick Park, I heard in the branches and fluttering leaves deep and sonorous echoes of pure joy, like the piano concertos of Brahms, or Wagner. Music ran along the roots of the trees Keep on reading....

The Globe

Shelley Buck traveled to India in 1972 by boat, train and bus. This is from East, her account of that journey.

“I don't want to travel with a woman,” explained the beefy American from San Diego, turning me down. “You get hassled.” We stood in the narrow lobby of Istanbul's Hotel Güngör, in the city's ancient Sultan Ahmet District. Timeworn and jammed with longhaired backpackers, the Güngör served as a kind of Council Bluffs for the overland traffic to India–a place to scrutinize ticket prices, plot out routes, and forge alliances.

The Güngör fronted on a street close by the Topkapi Palace, now a museum. There the hand of John the Baptist was said to be preserved and on display. Certainly somebody's hand was. Touring the palace, I eyed the relic in its glass case. Its fingers curled, the hand was wizened, brown, and smaller than my own. The palace also held the Peacock Throne of India–or said it did.

In the covered bazaar, a few blocks off, I bargained for a coin bearing the face of Alexander the Great, dressed up as a god. Probably Alexander also got told he couldn't go east, as he staged his Macedonian fighters before crossing the Hellespont into Asia. But unlike Alexander, I lacked an army to deal with hassles. It was 1972, and I hated being told “no.” Keep on reading....

Books by ePicaro Contributors:

Now available on Kindle!

Image courtesy Hippocrene Books

Image courtesy Kay Mehl Miller Ph.D

Image courtesy WriteWords Press

Image Courtesy WriteWords Press

Image courtesy Mitzi Penzes

Image courtesy Jacob Sackin

N

Image courtesy WriteWords Press

Image courtesy Oregon State University Press

ePicaro Press

Oregon State University Press

Hippocrene Books

WriteWords Press

Floating Point now available in paperback from WriteWords Press

Learn more about Shelley Buck at ePicaro Press

Learn more about Mitzi Penzes

Learn more about Jacob Sackin

Learn more about Ron Strickland at ronstrickland.com

Learn more about Jacob Sackin

Learn more about Shelley Buck at ePicaro Press

Learn more about Margaret Murray WriteWords Press

Learn more about Ron Strickland at ronstrickland.com