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October 21 2013

Driving and Working

I have a new and exciting project – a book called, “100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go,” to be published by Travelers Tales in Palo Alto, CA in 2014. This is not a guidebook per se, but more of a bucket list with a women’s perspective for people who love France, or might yet fall in love with it. This is not a simple task, as I can name 100 places just in the Marais, Bastille and Oberkampf neighborhoods of Paris where il faut aller. Without divulging any of my choices, I can safely say that Provence – the area from Arles to the Alpilles, and down along the Mediterranean coast from Frejus to Menton on the Italian border is likely to figure prominently. Americans are drawn to the James Bond sexiness and insouciance of the South of France as much as the act of puttering around the markets to inhale the scent of persimmons picked this morning, and a cool glass of rosé at lunchtime with fish just pulled from the sea. Not to mention the cinematic perfection, which filmmakers have been making good use of since the days of Louis Lumière.

So far, I’ve been writing, writing, writing. Taking notes on the color of the sky. Picking a cluster of tea olive blossoms that I press into my notebook. The clouds thicken up on the road to St. Paul de Vence while I’m at the wheel of a 1968 white Mustang convertible, the same one driven by Honor Blackman when she was 007’s foil in Goldfinger. I round one hairpin curve after another and the sea disappears into the distance, as does the awareness of my role on earth. I’m a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend but right now I’m all focus and drive. There is one road underneath and my mind is on only it. Get there safely, note the shifts in the air now that the temperature has dropped, press the brake. Note the sight of the medieval walls. Note the pattern in the footpath. Note the banyan tree near the Colombe d’Or.

It’s not a hard job (well, making a living and getting people to return your e-mails can both be rough) compared to telephone pole repairmen and triage nurses. But the work comes with me everywhere I go. Now, my mind ticks as I start to collate the search for 100 places in France, my print articles, the stories I want to write, the other unknown places I wish to know. As I descend to Nice, then settle onto the indoor terrace in my sea blue and green room at the Hi Hotel, the ideas are slamming onto the walls of my brain. The day spent galavanting along the Riviera in a sports car was an gorgeous one, but it was always and ever a workday.I’m not a car person and neither is my husband. He has a pickup and I have Toyota, and we use them to take us places we need to go, usually to the Stop & Shop for groceries. But today, the question looms: is this why people love to drive? There are wheels below, a sky above, a mission to accomplish in getting there, wherever ‘there’ is, and little else.
Except for writers who by definition, are always working. Even a stop at the CVS for a pack of gum is a chance to observe human behavior, sponge it all up, glean snippets of conversation.

October 21 2013

Up the Coast

I’m here on the Côte d’Azur to gather background material for some magazine articles, in the place where luxury came to nestle over a century ago in custom-built mansions among wild jasmine and palm trees. The odors of rose and citrus seem to be brewed in the coves that carve giant scallops into the coastline. It’s the same now as it was thirty years ago, when I first went to Nice. I had just completed my freshman year at Princeton where the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald, class of 2017 (dropped out, actually), floated for better or worse through all of us. It was part of Princeton lore to imagine the soon-to-be-great young man from Minnesota traipsing along Prospect Street and we joined him in these wanderings. His was a story with which we all became familiar: about his tragic wife Zelda, his relationship with his editor Maxwell Perkins, all freshly told by his biographer (another Princetonian, though from more recent years) Scott Berg.

He wrote about the gilded age and it was the side of paradise that was seductive because it was no more. Hard days had come and the good times had passed and how we craved them. How we crave them still.

At one time, I became aware of the great scholarly debate: The Great Gatsby vs. Tender is the Night. If the first is considered the most perfect novel ever written, the second (his last book, written after Zelda was hospitalized for schizophrenia) can be deemed a hot and craftless mess. I’ve always preferred the latter precisely because of its flaws: they create its own harmony. It’s also a richly descriptive novel (count the plants in the garden chez Diver in the first three paragraphs of Chapter 6: lemon, fig, lilac, iris, rose – and the corresponding colors) and from the first words, a classic (think Henry James, Edith Wharton) in the American in Europe genre. Despite the melancholy and infidelity and bleakness that unfolds so shatteringly, Dick and Nicole Diver threw great parties, with heirs and novelists and royalty and ne’er do wells. We didn’t want to be them, but we wanted to know them: “to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience,” the narrator says early on in the book, which I re-read on the Air France flight over.

Late in the afternoon, my car pulled up alongside the Belles Rives (once called Villa St. Louis), Fitzgerald’s former rented house in Juan-les-Pins, which is now a plush hotel. Some of his original furniture – art deco tables and chairs which German soldiers hadn’t destroyed or used for God-knows-what during the war – remains, as does the building, all spruced and polished to perfection. From the terrace above the cove, you can see the islands across the way, and imagine Gerald and Sara Murphy, on whom Fitzgerald based the characters of the Divers and to whom he dedicated the book. Most beautiful by far was the dining room, which was his office. It is lined with large windows that look out to the terrace which give way to the sea. There, inspiration is a tactile thing. Magic + talent = masterpiece.

It was impossible to expel the man from my thoughts later, over dinner at the Hotel Royal Antibes. Fitzgerald’s Riviera – the rose-colored hotel and long beach afternoons – was not simply his playground. It was a fertile field to be tilled and harvested many years later. Tender is the Night was published in 1934 – eight years after he left the Riviera.

October 20 2013

Arrivals

My head was pleasantly heavy upon arrival in Cannes. Air France – may it ever be so – still serves complimentary champagne even in economy class, and who am I to refuse it? We no longer wear white gloves when we board an airplane, but the French know that the voyage means nothing unless it is punctuated with ritual. To your health, the gesture seems to say, and to France’s. Vive….

The sea spread out before me from my balcony at the Hotel Splendid in Cannes. In years past, I would sleep when I landed from an overnight flight – peel off the traveling clothes, pull the crispy sheets over me, and stretch out at last until I awoke to my second morning that day. This time, I opted to sleepwalk in dreamtime through that first Sunday afternoon on the Cote d’Azur. The day was endless, a delicious blur of possibility: antique markets, fresh-picked figs in baskets and three cups of coffee at three different cafes. I walked La Croisette and clambered down to the beach. I think I saw two different carousels in Cannes that day but perhaps I imagined it.

Even for early October, the sun grilled my shoulders the next day on the boat to St. Honorat, a tiny island thirty seaborne minutes and a world away from Cannes. I’d just been indulged with a five-star lunch at the Grand Hotel, and the clink of glasses filled with rosé faded into silence on the water. Mediterranean pines and pomegranate trees dotted the landscape – and vineyards, where the Cistercian monks on the island produce six very fine and difficult to find wines.

I imagine, as I often do these days, if a stretch of contemplative time would be prescriptive or even possible for me nowadays. I recently interviewed Sherry Turkle, a scientist at MIT, who writes of the importance of solitude in a time when we are so connected by gadgets we are nevermore alone. I think about this a lot when I’m hiking in the woods at home, phone zipped into my cargo pants, and I get pinged by a friend. It takes some restraint not to write back, and usually I fail. When there are 200 messages in the Inbox and 42 texts to return, might not all of us harbor a desire for sunshine, a simple bed, and 360 degrees of rolling sea to separate us from every single person that needs us immediately, from my accountant to J Crew who is offering me a 20 per cent discount? Jetlagged, content, well-fed and far from home, there are more questions than usual to ponder.

June 18 2013

An Audience with Jan Morris

Recently, I attended an interview with the Welsh writer, Jan Morris. It was conducted on the stage at the Times Center in New York by author and editor Don George, who has his own stellar travel writing resume. The event, hosted by Geoex, was a benefit for the American Himalayan Foundation, its hook being the 60th anniversary of the conquest of Mount Everest. Morris, who at the time was James Morris and a reporter for the Times of London, is the last survivor of that expedition and it was she who, using a series of codes and couriers, broke the story to the world when Sherpa Tenzing and Sir Hillary reached the summit. Her scoop reached London just in time to share headlines with Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, making that June day in 1953 a triumphant one for the British Empire, whose history Morris documented in her three-part magnum opus, Pax Brittanica.

Morris’ mane of white hair gives her a multi-tiered aspect – aristocratic (think Barbara Bush tending roses on the lawn at Kennebunkport) but also grandmotherly as well as academic. And, she seems utterly approachable, even as she spun her anecdotes into gold, so naturally at ease with her extraordinary life and achievements that the rest of us may as well be, too. Morris is an icon among writers, especially among the diverse and disparate community (of which I am, as often as possible, a member) of “travel writers”. The fact that there is such a thing is due in great part to her, and Morris’ dispatches published in Rolling Stoneremain some of the most elegant and penetrating essays ever written about place. I remember one she wrote about Manhattan, which I recently found in a collection of hers called Destinations. I read this piece when I was a freshman in college and her words stuck with me: the city’s “glowering ecstasy”, it’s “reluctant and secretive beauty”, it’s citizens who “like the bear, are heightened, in one way or another, by their confinement.” The sting of ambition, the horror of failure: no one has gotten New York better than this European writer, and I kept this issue of Rolling Stone for years because I knew: I need to live there.

This might be the best a writer can do: leave an imprint, splash an image on the brain, plant a seed of desire to transport or be transported. Morris is a master at extracting the essence of a place, including the people who dwell within it. When Don George asked her about her methodology, her secret to doing what she does so well, her honest answer still managed to be a lesson in humility, which many writers either lack or toss off as self-deprecation – usually suspect. “Forgive me,” she said. “It really is a gift from God. I really didn’t know how to do anything else.”

Sitting in the audience, listening to Morris talk about Everest ’53 with as much casual wit as the anecdote about yesterday’s al fresco lunch at a New York City café, it was difficult not to entertain thoughts of, “Why bother?” This is something all travel writers must ponder, at some point. It’s no longer possible to write the seminal work on Venice as Morris did, with its magnificent opening sentence, which Don referenced in passing: “So, the Venetians became islanders, and islanders they remain, still a people apart, still tinged with the sadness of refugees.” Probably a trek through Oman with the Sultan and a team of slaves, an adventure Morris documented in 1957, isn’t going to happen either. That followed 1956’s Coast to Coast, her chronicle of a year spent driving across Eisenhower’s America, a year which Morris claims was the most marvelous of her life and one that, incredibly and in her words, “changed me more than Everest did.” She traversed the same highways towards many of the same places – San Francisco, Nevada, Salt Lake City, Chicago – as Jack Kerouac had done a few years before, but at the time there was no On the Road – that wasn’t published until 1957.

Rather than discourage me, however, my audience with Morris left me emboldened. No, I don’t think I or any of us can find an original way to commune with the ghosts on yonder Mayan ruin or imagine a fresh take on Paris’ Hidden Treasures. But what we can do, when we immerse ourselves in the strangeness of dislocation and remain aware enough to notice and write about it, is offer perspective. By virtue of time’s (and life’s) relentlessness, perspective constantly shifts, adapts, astonishes – this is where the stories come from. Getting stranded alone without a passport in Dubrovnik bears no similarity to dreaming away your honeymoon there ten years later. As long as the travel writer’s hunger to venture forth collides with the desire to drift along the fringe and observe, there is no limit to the tales that can be told. I agree with my friend and editor Lavinia Spalding, who says that all travel stories should ultimately be about the meaning of life (wisdom she, in turn, attributes to Don George). It’s a challenge we accept because of the significance of random events – how discovery comes when you least expect it. Think of the mango fresh from the tree an hour from Port-au-Prince whose juices dripped down your wrists as you peeled it without a blade. Remember the Dire Straits tune blasting through a bar in Samarkand when you were dry and thirsty from travel. Remember the young, off-duty soldier who helped dig your car out from under a fallen tree one icy Vermont morning.

These days, inspiration is most effective when it contains a revelation, and here’s what I thought as I listened to 87 year-old Morris, her narrative bouncing away with stories as fresh as tomorrow: Why not? Because if all else fails, there was something else she said that night, something elemental and yet spectacular: “I write for my own pleasure.” If she can do it, so can I, even if my Everest is just a simple hill, somewhere I’ve never been before.

March 20 2013

Relax and Enjoy the Cake

I wrote this essay for a series called ‘My Happy Age’ in the British magazine Easy Living, and since there’s no link, I wanted to post it.

On an evening last May, my friend and I sat in one of the plushest bars in Manhattan sipping white orchid Martinis, a prohibitively expensive drink we indulge in when there is something to celebrate. This time, it was her forty-seventh birthday, and while I set out to toast her endeavors and good health, the occasion turned a little soggy.

“I’m almost fifty,” my still-gorgeous and very accomplished friend said despondently.

She spit out the last word as if a hornet had just landed in her mouth. Her panic of living beneath the Damoclean sword of the mid-century mark was palpable. And I felt for her. My forty-seventh birthday was also the pits. I was tossing about on a sea of erratic hormones and midlife regret, convinced that the impending milestone meant the beginning of the slide into decrepitude (and death). But my consolation to her lay in a prediction from my own experience: her fear would, ironically, end at her fiftieth birthday. In fact, now that it’s behind me, I can say that the only bad thing about turning fifty is, well, turning fifty. When the sun comes up the morning after and shines on your sixth decade, the horizon is utterly brighter and full of promise. And here I am, at 51, certain that this is the best year yet. Sixty is still too far off to dread.

When I finished high school, I had no idea who I was or would become and it seemed that each day, another cataclysmic decision loomed. It is terrifying to realize that your life has yet to be lived, and to know that the choices you make could reverberate forever. My twenties were spent falling in and out of love, and toiling eighty hours a week in the newsroom. I was married at 31, and seven days before I turned 34 my first child was born. I remember almost nothing of the rest of my thirties because I was obliterated by fatigue and second-guessing my own wing-it style of parenting. These years arrived and passed in a blur because whatever identity I had was given over – both willingly and unconsciously – to raising my children.

My forties were the worst. I saw my youth begin to fade in aging’s slo-mo tragedy. A few gray hairs sullied my glossy mane, and I noticed folds on my face that I swore weren’t there the day before. I neglected my marriage and my friendships, my community and my ambition. Fortunately, my health was fine, but there were new strains in my hips and knees, and I could no longer hold more than a single gin and tonic or prance around in four-inch heels all day. At 47, I had an epic midlife crisis. I became obsessed with my disappointments – financial, emotional and otherwise – and what I believed I was losing, as if the future held nothing but blackness. My 50th birthday felt like an oncoming bullet train. I decided not to celebrate with great fanfare, as others had done. Instead, after an intimate dinner with a few close friends, I jetted off to Russia solo, to relive a voyage I had made frequently in my twenties. All I could do was wallow in memory.

But on my birthday, almost instantly, the great weight lifted.

I’m not sure if the years have offered me wisdom, but like every adult, I’ve been through the ringer. That’s just what happens in a life spent raising children, working for a living, being broke and flush, facing every kind of responsibility, experiencing elation, despair and mostly, everything in between. “Happiness” as a state of being is not something I strive for or even believe in, but if you contend, as I do, that life is full of happy moments, then 51 is the age where you can finally see and appreciate them.

I welcome the onset of courage. Now it’s easier to say “no” when the impossible is asked of me, and I no longer care if someone gets mad about it, or if they like me, hate me, love my writing or think I’m a hack. I know my good qualities, and understand my faults even better. When I experience personal or professional rejection, I brush off my boots and soldier on. There is no time for whining, only the urgency of maximizing these still-fruitful years. These are conclusions I have made with my own free will, earned day in and day out over 51 years of life, always gaining knowledge.

I’m fortunate that I finally have a strong marriage (though that was hard-won), and my kids have grown into fascinating, accomplished people. Yes, the facial lines are getting harder to camouflage and I have to exercise twice as much as when I was 25 to get the same results. I defiantly refuse to cross any dreams off my list but I have a realistic assessment of what I can demand of myself and others, and with whom I’d like to spend my precious time. Lately, I’ve seen too often how quickly a robust person can become a severely ill one. But for now, I’m healthy and I have the presence of mind to appreciate that fact, as well as my good luck to be born in a place and time where living to 51 is even possible. I have much to look forward to, and I wouldn’t go back for anything – except, maybe, a second slice of cake.

December 10 2012

Who Gets a Seat at the Table? (and other questions)

Photos: Heidi Gutman

Recently my friend Michael Maren directed a scene in Brooklyn for his movie, A Short History of Decay, that fast became part of New York literary folklore. In this shot, Nathan (played by Bryan Greenberg who looks quite a bit like Channing Tatum) is a flailing writer, who is certain he’s a failing writer. His girlfriend (also a writer, but a successful one) is tapped out from his lack of confidence and has just shown him the door, so he escapes to Kos Kaffe, a coffee bar in Park Slope. With one excruciating gaze, Nathan sees the place stacked end to end with writers, real ones, famous ones, people with book deals and editors who care about them and bylines in the New Yorker. Is it real or is it fantasy? In either case, he senses he’s an interloper to a club where he has no business belonging. Cruel reality then deals him another blow: he sees that there is not a single seat left in the coffee shop. There is no room – there or seemingly anywhere else on earth, even a corner to weep into a lousy cappuccino – for the likes of him. It’s an achingly universal moment and when Michael let me read his lovely screenplay over a year ago, it touched me as a personal one.

It was great fun and the air was electric, aided by the coffee on tap the staff tirelessly churned out. But I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit, as I sat with Jennifer Egan, Michael Cunningham, Roxana Robinson, Elissa Schappell, Philip Gourevitch, my dear friends Abigail Pogrebin and Dani Shapiro (who is married to the director), Kurt Anderson,Hannah Tinti, Jane Green and a passel of other writers, that I was infected with a large dose of Nathan-esque doubt. Mostly I asked myself: had I had I earned a place in their company? Yes, I’ve been writing all my life, but it’s been less than three years since my first real published piece – in Vogue, an essay about marriage – offered me a launching pad at last. I already had piles of rejection before then and since, I’m constantly finding new ways to define ‘disappointment’. Some days I do have to wonder: what’s the point? Who’s even listening? Seriously, folks. Does the world really need another writer?

What’s remarkable, though, is how quickly and reliably the buoyancy and rush can return. It takes a simple piece of good news in the Inbox – an editor who likes your idea or your voice or the essay you sent, cold, having mustered up all the courage in the world, crafting an e-mail with the perfect mix of self-deprecation and scorched-earth intrepidity. And sometimes I just peck out something for myself that no one may ever see and I revel in the sheer, magic elasticity of words. It can actually take the dark out of the nighttime, as Dylan said about a woman (but it can go for work, too).

I’m not sure if I’m a writer because I have something to say or I simply want to be heard, or if I just want to try to make gorgeous sentences because it’s so ridiculously satisfying. I do know that though every morsel of bad news ushers in a fresh episode of disappointment, these defeats are integral to productivity. This is the truth: they get me in my chair every day. My husband is a sculptor who has lots of wisdom and even some useful bromides. My favorite is: you’ve only failed when you stop trying.

I would guess that most every writer in the café has, at one time, seen failure, experienced bad reviews, or been set back by a crisis of confidence. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone among them, from whatever rung on the success ladder, might have thought him or herself lesser, in comparison, than someone else across the room. I’m still eager, sometimes anxious, for one of my books to be published. Where does that put me on the spectrum? And really, does it matter? I suspect that there is a little Nathan in everyone (or most everyone) in the coffee shop that morning. It was, after all, just a room full of men and women, working hard, moving forward with the next big idea, unwilling or unable to rest on laurels if they’re lucky or talented enough to have earned them. Poor Nathan was having a bad day in that scene – the kind we all endure. I wonder if any of the authors on the movie set that morning might ever have their own dark, irrational moments, where even they might question if they belong at the table.

September 14 2012

2012 Lowell Thomas Awards

September 13, 2012

Today, I’m honored to have won three Lowell Thomas Awards, which is thrilling in the field of travel journalism. They are 1) The Grand Prize Silver Award for Travel Journalist of the Year; 2) Silver Award in Personal Comment for ‘Masha’; and 3) Bronze Award in the foreign travel article category for “Green Pastures and the Ghosts of Rwanda”. I got the news in an e-mail as I poked around a gas station convenience store while my tank filled up, after taking my dog Gus to the vet. The awards were announced at a conference in Indianapolis. Along with the other winners I (and my work) appeared in a short film that was shown at the luncheon. I won for stories written in Russia, Haiti, Rwanda and France. There were many strong characters in these essays, and I couldn’t have written anything without them. Masha, a beautiful savior. Val, a PhD who is trying to increase the food supply in his native Haiti. The desk clerk in Kigali who schooled me in guilt. Guy Martin, a chef in Paris.

I had submitted these pieces several months ago to The SATW (Society of American Travel Writers) Foundation, urged on by my editor and friend, Lavinia Spalding. It’s a constant challenge to keep track of the pieces I send out with regularity to overworked and oversolicited editors, accompanied by cheerful little notes. But I have to believe in my work, always fearlessly and fully. I submit essays and fiction to literary journals, and I am rejected daily. I don’t take any of it personally. I soldier on. Sometimes things work out, and today, it did. Here’s what the judges from the UNC School of Journalism said about the Grand Prize award:

Sometimes a writer can get into your head describing scenery and people as if you were seeing it yourself. Marcia DeSanctis does just that in “A Grand Return,” about a 20th-anniversary trip to a legendary Paris restaurant, and again in “One Day, Three Dead Men,” sharing her return visit to Moscow after 28 years. But the brightest jewel in a crown of remarkable stories is “Green Pastures and the Ghosts of Rwanda,” where again DeSanctis is one with her readers. Of airports she writes: “They are my hello and goodnight, the place I cross with an exhausted shuffle when I arrive and impatiently want to ditch when I leave.” After arriving in the country and retiring to a guesthouse, DeSanctis begins to tell the story of Rwanda’s ghosts and mass killing that took place there. “I repaired to my too-quiet room and fell back on the bed. … Sensing something more akin to mortal sickness rather than terror, I imagined the thousands of people who were killed in the neighborhood I slept in, and pictured their souls swirling around in the windy night.” It is reflective writing at its best. During a conversation with a night clerk she inquires about his heritage.

“Oh,” I said. “Are your parents…I mean your family…”
“No, they are all dead,” he said. “I never knew them, really.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault,” he said.

We are treated to a harrowing encounter when DeSanctis is side kicked by a charging 500-pound gorilla during a jungle trek. Afterwards, in conversation with a soldier, the following exchange occurs:
“I think the gorilla liked you.”
“I’m not actually sure that’s a compliment,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “But you will surely remember him.”

Later that day and no worse for the experience she drinks a tonic water and lime on a beach. The narrative of what Marcia DeSanctis experiences vacillates from current-day scenes to past Rwandan horrors whose memories she cannot shake. For a tour de force in writing excellence she earns the silver in the Grand Award category.

Thank you judges, whoever you are, for understanding what I was trying to say and why.

Here is the link in Overnight Buses for my Rwanda piece (which you can download for free), and what the judges said about this one:

“Green Pastures and the Ghosts of Rwanda,” by Marcia DeSanctis, takes travelers through the hellos and goodbyes that are part of transiting airports. She describes them as “miserable, inhuman places, churning people in and out like an automatic dishwasher, offering lattes to the unthirsty and warm water in the restroom, if you can figure out that country’s faucet mechanics.” By the second paragraph she has prepared readers for a deeper story, one wrapped in the harsh realities of the genocide that took place in Rwanda. While in the country to do pro bono consulting for a small NGO, DeSanctis navigated the streets, spent days in remote villages and trekked up muddy hillsides. Through most of her visit, it was difficult to see “Rwanda’s beauty, hope and promise.” She writes, “Everyone seemed to bear a mark of the country’s recent terror. Each man was a perpetrator, each woman was a survivor, each teenager was a victim, and everyone was a witness.” It is only when she visits the Akagera Game Preserve that she finds comic relief with a team of baboons. Later she travels to Virunga Park, near the border of Uganda and the DRC, to hike and take a 60-minute gorilla tour. Suddenly, after 30 minutes of visiting and snapping pictures of gorilla families, a 500-pound male gorilla heads straight toward DeSanctis, strikes her, spins her around. After recovering, she conversed with the guide: “‘I think he wanted to show me who was boss,’ I said, trying not to look as weak and scared as I felt.” By the time she returns to the airport to depart, she understands that while she wasted time thinking too much of Rwanda’s tragedy, everyday Rwandans were moving on. Marcia DeSanctis passionately and deftly writes her way to the bronze.

Here is a link to Masha on Geoex (and it also ran in Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011). And what the judges said:

Some people we never forget, even when they were with us for a relatively short time. In another wonderfully written, rich tale of human interaction, Marcia DeSanctis tells of a kind young woman who cared for her while she was ill in Moscow many years ago and, maybe telling us more about herself than about the woman, how she has never forgotten that act of kindness. It’s the type of story that makes us feel good about people.

Here is a link to a piece about a voyage around Haiti with two NGOs.

Congratulations to all the talented writers and editors who were honored today! Here is the list of all the winners.

It’s a big wide beautiful world.