This spring, we went back to Isla Mujeres for our second time as a family and my third time overall. I left a copy of Currency at PocNa, the hostel where I stayed when I visited the island as a backpacker round about 1995. In the book, I pasted the same note that I have [...]
Archive for the ‘backpacking’ Category
CURRENY is Traveling. I’m Staying Home.
Posted in backpacking, CURRENCY, Facebook, memory lane, solo women traveling, Thailand, travel, travel writing, writing process, tagged CURRENCY, Facebook, Isla Mujeres, memory lane, solo women traveling, Thailand, travel, writing process on July 7, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
My History with Heroines
Posted in backpacking, CURRENCY, fiction, memory lane, solo women traveling, travel writing, tagged CURRENCY, Heroines, Little Women, Minor Characters, On the Road, SheWrites, solo women traveling, Women and Children First on October 3, 2010 | 5 Comments »
This past Thursday, at the invitation of SheWrites co-creator Deborah Siegel, I appeared at Women and Children First bookstore along with Teri Coyne, Audrey Niffenegger, Amina Gautier, and Emily Gray Tedrowe as part of a panel exploring modern-day heroines. I could diagram that sentence to show about twenty different sources of personal gratification: Women and [...]
Made in Thailand
Posted in backpacking, CURRENCY, memory lane, Thailand, travel, tagged backpacking, CURRENCY, memory lane, Thailand, travel on July 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The excellent music/lit blog Largeheartedboy allowed me to create a Currency play list for their Book Notes feature. I’ve always seen western music as playing an important part of Piv’s identity, and it certainly has been an important part of mine, so this was a fun assignment. For one of the entries, the song “Made [...]
Haven’t I Seen You Here Before?
Posted in backpacking, CURRENCY, fiction, memory lane, solo women traveling, Thailand, writing process, tagged backpacking, fiction Currency, memory lane, solo women traveling, Thailand, writing process on June 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
(I posted this missive last week on The Nervous Breakdown last week, so if you read it there, skip this. If you haven’t heard of The Nervous Breakdown and you like to read short nonfiction on screen, you should totally check out the site. ) Getting ready for my recent trip to L.A., I told [...]
In Which I Consider Thai Prophylactics
Posted in backpacking, CURRENCY, memory lane, solo women traveling, Thailand, tagged backpacking, CURRENCY, memory lane, solo women traveling, Thailand, writing process on February 8, 2010 | 6 Comments »
So I last wrote about my first day traveling truly alone in Thailand, in which I was tricked into lodging at the wrong guesthouse, hit up for money by an odd teenager, and hounded by tuk-tuk drivers as I attempted to tour the ruins by foot, only to end up by late afternoon drinking with [...]
Hey, Baby, Let’s Go for a Ride
Posted in backpacking, memory lane, solo women traveling, Thailand, travel, tagged backpacking, memory lane, solo women traveling, Thailand, travel on January 18, 2010 | 9 Comments »
So, the risks I took, women take, when traveling alone. In my previous post, I described shacking up with two strange men on my first night in Bangkok. A day or so later, I got in touch with my friend Jillana, who was living there, and I crashed at her apartment and let her show [...]
Lucky? And/or smart? Solo Women and Safety
Posted in backpacking, memory lane, solo women traveling, Thailand, tagged backpacking, memory lane, solo women traveling, Thailand on January 7, 2010 | 10 Comments »
So I’ve been thinking about the “white chicks shouldn’t” theme for awhile, now, and about how, consciously or unconsciously, most women have a strategy for dealing with the threat of sexual violence. I’m at a stage in my life where I rarely traverse the nighttime streets alone, but I do walk home from work on [...]
Acknowledging
Posted in backpacking, CURRENCY, fiction, memory lane, Thailand, travel, writing process, tagged backpacking, CURRENCY, fiction, journals, memory lane, Thailand, travel on October 18, 2009 | 8 Comments »
I just sent the copyedited manuscript of CURRENCY to Gina, my editor. The next time I see the novel, it will be in galleys, manuscript no more. It’s been twelve years since I workshopped the experiment in voice that became the first chapter of the novel. I was 28 years old then, and I smoked [...]
Similarities between shoestring travel and life with a newborn
Posted in backpacking, Parenting, solo women traveling, Thailand, travel, tagged backpacking, newborn, nursing, Parenting, traveling on September 20, 2009 | 3 Comments »
1. There are the similar physical humiliations— the diarrhea or leaking breasts, the forced doing of once unthinkable things, begging a bus driver to stop so you can relieving yourself in the weeds, baring your breast to nurse in a crowded subway train. 2. There’s the same dependence on a bible, The Lonely Planet, or [...]
Letter to Sari
Posted in backpacking, Parenting, Thailand, travel, travel writing, tagged babies, collic, Rogers Park, Sari, travel on July 6, 2009 | 4 Comments »
For a chunk of my 20s, my focus was on traveling. If I wasn’t on the move, I was dreaming or writing about traveling. My mode was shoestring, solo. I was chasing the drug of discombobulation and the scrambled-for view, the circumstances where just getting to the post-office could be an eye-popping adventure made possible [...]
