Term: Essay
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Looking for Colour in the Cool Grey City
In October 2019, I could finally afford to visit the city of my youthful dreams. As a Japanese American teenager in the late 1950s, I...
Remembering Shay Youngblood
In January 2023, I had the honour of being invited to participate in the inaugural Freedom Writers Retreat for Black Women Writers at Black-owned boutique...
Visible and Invisible in Paris: A Reflection on Place, Identity, and Belonging
Travel entrepreneur Dawn S. Booker offers a refreshing, clear-eyed alternative to romanticised accounts by Black American travellers and expats in Paris. Booker, who teaches annually...
Whose Vacation Is This Anyway?
Joy Harris’s “Whose Vacation is this Anyway?” explores generational and cultural differences in travel expectations when she takes her two teenage nieces to Paris in...
A Sharecropper’s Daughter Goes to Paris
This powerful essay by Lydia Nayo, written decades before anyone imagined the Black Travel Movement, chronicles her journey from utilitarian, necessity-driven travel rooted in her...
Too Legit
Carol McGruder’s “Too Legit” explores Black American expatriate life in 1990s Paris, examining spontaneous networks of solidarity between touring African American performers and Black women...
Why Paris?
Acclaimed visual artist, sculptor, novelist, and poet, as well as the first Black American woman to receive an MFA degree from Yale, Barbara Chase-Riboud has...
Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure Partnership
Panorama is excited to partner with Elaine Lee, editor of the groundbreaking anthology Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure (1997), which...
From Deathstyle to Joie de Vivre: My Parisian Transformation
The brother’s passport pages were so crammed with stamps that accordion extensions bulged the back cover. He’d had to renew his passport two years early...
Revolution, Interrupted: Richard Wright’s Parisian Dissent & Death Keenan Norris
This excerpt from “Death in Paris (1960),” which appears in Keenan Norris’s Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings, revisits the final years of Richard...
Brown Girl in Paris: Notes from a Non-Expat Life
American/Canadian N.A. Narayan’s frank, first-person account of living on her own in Paris for the last 7 years after a job opportunity in Burundi fell...
Black Girl in Paris
Paris. September 1986. Early morning. She is lying on her back in a hard little bed with her eyes closed, dreaming in French. Langston was...
White Knights—Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon 50 Years On
The Mekong Delta wetlands were grey, dotted with glinting roofs and petrified boats, rivers winding every which way like a gigantic drip painting. The city...
We Threw Her in the Seine
My limbs were feather-light, hands and feet buoyant, and my Sharpie-drawn makeup refused to budge. I was made to drown. Toilet paper rolls supported my...
The Kindness of Strangers
I was 20 years old and headed overseas for a six-month study abroad experience. Of course, there were complications—it was my senior year in college,...
The Day Before We Saw Pompeii
One weekend in late September of my senior year of college, my classmate Riley and I took an overnight bus from our school in Perugia...
Paris with My Father
After my long wait at Charles de Gaulle airport, where the joyful reunions and towering luggage of African families bottlenecked the exits; after the train...
A Cravat and a Handful of Mary Medals
I hadn’t picked up Tin Ujević—the famous Croatian poet—in years. But the week before I left for Paris, I pulled weeds from the stone chapel...
A Beautiful Village
The first time I visited Europe, I was travelling with my 12-year-old son, Nick. My husband had died six years earlier, and I wanted to...
P. Burgos Street, Makati, Manila
The street has one of those mad people who sometimes shouts incoherently. She’s an old woman. More ancient than her years. Some of the tourists...
Consider the Trees
I’m in the middle of the woods… I ride out unpredictable beats. Spasm songs. I look up to the web of stems, watch them dance...
Where is the River?
I never leave Paris without having the sense of a missed opportunity. Not because I didn’t go to the coolest or oldest or weirdest bistro...
The Girl No One Knew
It was 1975, in Irkutsk—a quiet Siberian city wrapped in the concrete hush of the Soviet era. My grandmother and I walked through her friend...
Studying French as a Chinese American Woman
In Avignon, hungry and desperately wanting lunch, I wandered into a bakery. Like any customer, I went up to the counter and ordered a sandwich,...
Easter in Yamate
The sight greeting me as I walked out of the condo in Futakotamagawa in Tokyo at 7am on Easter Sunday felt auspicious. There was no...
A Strange Gift
He came home from work the other day carrying, apart from his usual laptop bag, a gift box about the size of a pop-up toaster....
A Bloom in the Dark
Just north of Paris, where I’d moved with my husband Ben a year earlier, the French national football team was playing Germany at the Stade...
Egg Salad and Other Nudities
It wasn’t the nudity that surprised me. It was the egg salad. I had braced myself for the bodies — sagging, swinging, sun-dappled — but...
The Art of the Hammock
Sometimes, that Adirondack Lake or mountain hike are out of reach because of responsibility or money. Sometimes a walk or our backyards will tide us...
For the Birds
If numbers were power, chickens would rule the animal kingdom. With over 35 billion of them roaming Earth, the population of Gallus domesticus outnumbers humans...
The Environmental Community
Inspired by the Twyford Down protests of thirty years ago, in which a tribe lived on the wildness they sought to protect, Pens of the...
Issue 15: Paris
Paris has long been the site of opulence, resistance, rebellion, and style. It has inspired great writing and writers, philosophy and philosophers. In this collection,...
The Sneaker Wave
It was mid-morning by the time I turned off Highway 1 and onto the gravel road leading to Pt. Lobos State Park on the central...
What the Undisputed Witness to the Woodpecker Wrote
When nature writing outlasts the nature written of, we should re-read it. While it may never have been originally intended as such, what we’ll have...
The Horse and the Sea
When I bring my horse to the sea, we both must face our fears of the rising tide. Our struggles stretch across ancestors and oceans,...
Snows of Yesteryear
“Location, location, location,” the mantra of realtors and vacation brochures goes. I say timing is equally crucial when looking at scenic lands. I knew the...
Summer of Seventeen
My older brother Dan and I stood patiently along the side of the road north of Accra, Ghana. A white Daihatsu pickup truck approached, and...
Jojo the Spirit Animals First Hike to Uncle Ed Thomas Grave
Jojo came to us on a night with one of those big full moons. Maybe it was called blood, grapefruit, or wolf, depending, but I...
Eternal and Temporary
It was already past nightfall, the sky glowing orange to the west where a hungry wildfire swallowed meadow after mountain, when I slipped out of...
And Dil Came Tumbling After
“You go ahead,” he said. That at least is what he meant when he made that familiar gesture—a quick, upward-turned ruffling of the air before...
Active Recall
After I found out I was going to have a baby, I started filming one second of every day. I used an app that allows...
Abroad in the Night
I should be terrified of bears. More than fifteen years ago, in the Teton Range of Wyoming, a friend and I were hiking down a...
Undercurrents
“We’re going to the seaside,” I tell my three-year-old, Jordan, who smiles, claps his pudgy hands as if he understands. A weekend to Hastings, that...
Homesick for Going
For years, the old man in apartment 3B of the mint-green building sat in front of a tumbleweed stack of newspapers at a wide wood...
Hastings Street
I have never liked this house much. For many years it felt like someone else’s house, not my own. It’s homely from the street, a painted...
An Hour at the Salon
Ash falls on your shoulders as you walk towards a salon for a manicure. You see the smoke. The air smells like your grandfather’s ashtray....
A Field on the Edge of England
In the hinterland beyond the last rows of houses, where the town peters out into farmland and straggling industrial sites, there is a place, wide...
Called to Pray
Wafts of saffron and mint tea flirted with my attention as I took in my surroundings. Worn tarps were strewn overhead, a weak defense from...
Mountain Weather
As soon as I woke up, I thought, please let today be different. For a moment, I lay still, repeating those words in my head,...
Swimming to Neverland
Two years ago, I found Neverland. Unlike the island Barrie described in his famed works, this one isn’t in some tropical place full of flamingos...
Splendour Built on Mud
“I hope Venice will recognise me,” I think, as my train pierces the silver lagoon and carries me across the bridge that hooks the fish-shaped...
The Endless Safari
I was asked countless times if I was going to see the Big Five in Botswana, except there only ended up being four, and my...
Issue 14: Survival
Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’s 14th edition, on the theme of ‘survival.’ Many thanks to all contributors and the editors...
Infinite scroll
Scroll through all work published by Panorama in one long infinitely scrolling page.
Adaptations
The only way I could leave California was to trick myself with a promise to return. I made my vow in Tuolumne Meadows, part of Yosemite...
Death by Fox, Cow or River? Suburbanite in the Yorkshire Countryside
Who’s there? From my house’s mustardy Picasso face, I peer sleepily in the morning through one of its offset eyes. I’m trying to motivate myself...
Sachunterricht
Growing up on two acres next to a lake in upstate New York, I spent many hours outside. Pretending there was quicksand in the reeds,...
A World Burning with Life: On Zoe Schlanger’s The Light Eaters
Back in the 1970s, a book called The Secret Life of Plants exploded onto The NY Times bestseller list, and ironically, set the field of...
Under A Blood Red Sun
Outside, an injured, blood-red sun. You’ve never seen anything like it. You’ve never smelled this smell before: earth on fire. You stand on the narrow...
Buongiorno
“I’m betting airport security is looking through your things,” says my host Ursula over our Italian breakfast, a sugary pastry and full-strength coffee, on her...
Under Your Flaming Shirt
You too might have done this. No, you, of all people, my friend, must have. I say that not just because I relish the security...
Pilgrim's Fire
As I walk farther up Woodenshoe Canyon its walls grow closer together and more sinuous. The floor of the canyon is mostly sand, and the...
Cold Hearths
This is a remote part of the Scottish highlands — an abandoned township two miles from the nearest scrap of civilisation, a seldom-used road. It’s...
Walking to Pho in Hanoi
The unassuming pho shop in question sits just down the road, about 150 paces from my Hanoi apartment. I walk up my green-canopied alley and...
Kre-mas-i
On my way back from Sidemen to Canggu, the traffic barely moved. Otherwise empty rural roadsides were packed, bike to bike, bumper to bumper. I...
What I Thought I Had
My father’s property sat at the end of the newly cut Dream Farm Road—a steep rutted track through uncut forest, bordered by the Point Reyes...
I Walk in the Dark Because the British AI Lady Told Me So
The bug-eyed black goldfish, Sukoshi (which means “little-bit” in Japanese) wiggles his pretty lacy tail goodbye as I sneak out the front door of my...
Kamata: A Place for Dumplings in a Laundromat
In Japan, Mr. Shirota is a famous bluegrass banjo player. Yes, I will be picking up several of his CDs to bring back to Eastern...
Issue 13: Fire
Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’s 13th edition, on the theme of ‘fire.’ Fire: /ˈfʌɪə/ origin: Old English fȳr (noun), fȳrian...
How to Survive the Streets as a Girl in the Old Medina
You’re having a good hair day (unusual, I know!). It’s rarely necessary to plough the stork nest with a comb, yet today your mane is...
Movement
“Murakami kind of ruined writing about jazz for everyone else,” said a friend, well, a boss really, but he feels like a friend. I’ll try....
Mirror Hours in Kathmandu
9:11 am. There it is again, on my phone and out of place. This time I am in Namo Buddha, a pilgrimage site way above...
Green Walls Lit in the Night
At the point when part of me knew our relationship would be over soon, we were living in a country governed by its military. We...
To the Señora on the First Floor
You are the oldest señora in our building. I first noticed you during the earthquake that took place three months after I arrived in Mexico...
Remember, Breathe
1. Decide to study abroad in Scotland for four months. When your family takes to the airport, you’re shaking. Almost turn back. Almost give up....
My Wilderness Refuge in the City
For many years I’ve lived on a bluff with a wilderness in my backyard. However, I don’t live in some remote area but in Anchorage,...
L.A. Cinemas: The City’s Real Houses of Worship
You’re here, and it’s a party but you feel like you’re stepping into a cathedral, and the crowded bar glows like an altar. L.A. worships...
Flipbook Corn
Outside the window an endless ocean of tall green cornstalks stretched for miles alongside the highway. The perfectly aligned rows at 70 miles per hour...
Departure Point
Every river seems to have a place like this; somewhere small boats go to die. The rotting fibreglass carcasses of forgotten pleasure craft and Sunday...
A Perpetual Chameleon Dance
The Tate Modern, the National Portrait Gallery, the Natural History Museum, the fabulous Victoria and Albert… all of them fabulous, and within walking distance. But...
Without Rhyme of Reason
“Everything there looked foreign,” you said. That must have been in one of our early conversations though not the earliest. You were talking about your...
Cut Through: Graves and Cats through a Samurai trail
From a distance, the houses encrusting the hills of the Kotsubo neighbourhood remind me of barnacles. They crowd together, layer upon layer, hiding the surface...
In Company With Spiders
Most of the spiders living in the house that I share with my husband and our terrier are the small-bodied, long-legged variety. They station themselves...
What Would He Have Said?
To Pay Our Respects. As we stand at the gates of the Mauthausen concentration camp, more than at any other time previously, I feel acutely...
The Goat in the Stairwell
The commotion outside our apartment highlighted the quiet within. Unspoken words poked at the cracks in our marriage, picking them apart, unravelling their edges. They...
Symphony of the Train
1. linden. 2. central. 3. noyes. 4. foster. 5. davis. 6. howard. 7. waiting on the platform. 8. granville. 9. cermak-chinatown. 10. swiping out.
Spiritual Identity
I am neither the mind, nor the intellect, memory, nor ego. Nor am I ears, nor tongue. I am not the nose, nor eyes, nor...
The Hungarian Vegetarian
I’m not sure if my father was joking when he told me over the phone that my grandmother would be turning in her grave if...
Pastizzi
I am twenty years old and have just eaten what I think is the most perfect pastry in the world. But I think I’m in...
Dry Land Fishing
A couple carrying rough bags are walking down the railroad tracks in front of my house in Jeremiah, Kentucky. Thin and young, they are dressed...
In Search of a Lost Japantown
Welcome to Tacoma, Washington, USA, my adopted hometown. Tacoma is the third-largest city in Washington State, after our “big sister” city that gets all the...
Srinagar: Occupation by Day & Night
I arrive on a domestic flight from Delhi to Srinagar during Ramadan in 2018, registering as a foreigner three times, palms sweating and grateful that...
Marrakech’s Medina: “A Simple Path of Reading”
When I travelled to Marrakech a year ago, I never imagined that I would return. Yet, back in New York City, something about the Marrakshi...
Dreaming in Diaspora
I have always been a dream collector–someone who pays attention to dreams, writes them down, looks them up, and tries to interpret their messages. When...
Food Shopping in Rome
In the US, naturally, I drove to the supermarket. The route led down a pot-holed avenue walled with office buildings. I loaded a cart with...
Just Breathe
Feet dragging from the elevator, I punch in the pin to my front door, ready to escape the heat and humidity of my three-minute walk...
Cemetery Conversations with My Dead Dad
In 2019, I returned to London for the first time since 1990. I remembered the city vividly, both because I’d looked at the photos countless...
Mission Dolores Park: A Map Oneirica
My right fibula hurts when I walk as a Boricua in San Francisco, dreaming of the home I left. Nobody knows my name here, nor...
The Great Falafel War of Egypt
My time in Egypt through the auspices of the Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad allowed for many smaller-scale experiences that augmented the wonderful lectures and visits to...
My Transit Dance Rhythms
In the early morning, before golden streaks of light wash the sky, I head out. Breezing past the long, unspectacular Telegraph in fits and stops,...
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