Author Steven P. Unger recently revisited New Orleans as an invitee to the Vampire Film Festival’s Midsummer Nightmare. Since Unger is the author of In the Footsteps of Dracula: A Personal Journey and Travel Guide, his focus is naturally — or perhaps unnaturally — on the city’s more Gothic aspects. Like the Spanish Moss that […]
Entries Tagged as 'Time and Place'
A Train Ride to Provo
March 29th, 2012 · 1 Comment · En Route, Time and Place
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 […]
A Cowtown Hula
November 15th, 2011 · 1 Comment · Road Less Travelled, Time and Place
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 […]
Tags: Hawaii·Shelley Buck
A Great Start in Venice
October 8th, 2011 · No Comments · Time and Place
In this excerpt from her new book, Perfectly Crazy, novelist Mitzi Penzes takes a successful woman entrepreneur, teams her up with a man as desirable as the Michelangelo statue, and folds both into Venice. Finally they were in Venice. They stayed in a small room in Hotel Flora close to Piazza San Marco. Despite being […]
Tags: Mitzi Penzes·Venice
Off the Trail: Walden Pond
April 27th, 2011 · No Comments · Time and Place
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 […]
Surfing Santa
December 4th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Time and Place, travel near home
Margaret Murray 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, […]
Uluru
June 29th, 2010 · No Comments · Time and Place
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 […]
Pittsburgh
July 20th, 2009 · No Comments · Looking Homewards, Time and Place
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 […]