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Like many, I had been hotly anticipating Cheryl Strayed’s memoir WILD, about her solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. I had been so hotly anticipating it, and reading so much about the hottness of others’ anticipation, that I got a little worried. How could it live up? And there were points in the first, oh, thirty pages or so when I was almost…
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 in the other copies I’ve sent out into the…
As I wrote earlier, I’ve been loving me my yoga these days. A recent class with the theme of traveling particularly blissed me out. But— just in the nick of time—the following week’s theme pulled me from the brink of total submission and back toward the almost-angry-at-anything-smacking-of-new-age camp. It touched a nerve about American entitlement that relates to women’s safety issues as well as…
I’ve been practicing yoga off and on for over twenty years. When I’m in the zone of a good class, sensory memories of other places I’ve done yoga flow through me: Sheffield, England, where I took my first classes; the beaches of Thailand; the Ayurvedic retreat outside of Katmandu where I submitted to a rigorous treatment; a rooftop in Pokhara; a loft in old-school…
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 in Thailand” by the Thai band Carabao, I found…
First, the shameless self-promotion: If you haven’t yet heard, my novel CURRENCY is still pretty hot off the press. It’s an exciting yet thoughtful tale of love and adventure in Thailand. But don’t take my word for it! My dad says the same thing. So does the reviewer at The Traveler’s Library. And—this just in—the reviewer at NewPages. Please read it. If you’ve read…
First off, let me say that Currency officially hits the streets right about now. Dear visitor, I beg you not to judge this book on the absence of a dedicated web site. It is a hundred times better than its web presence, and although there’s little excuse for that in this day and age, isn’t it preferable to the reverse? Currency is exciting yet…
A year ago today the four of us were returning from Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Lilli had just turned one and Tillio was about to turn eight. It was a low-budget, low-key jaunt to a pretty commonplace destination, but it was a great, great trip. We got off the ferry to the cheerful, semi-grimy tourist hustle that you’d expect from a bargain beach destination, the…
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 me around. That made the transition to the foreign…
[Photo by Lisa Meehan Williams] Most of my Facebook friends I know personally, but a couple of them are just vague internet acquaintances, if even that. It was one of these, a guy, who posted a link titled “White Chicks Shouldn’t,” and because this phrase caught my eye, I clicked. The link was to a three-minute video clip taken at an outdoor Jamaican dancehall….
Zoe Zolbrod 