Term: Issue 16: Encounters
Explore all pages categorised under the heading Issue 16: Encounters below.
All categories can be seen on the main index page.
While our guides prepare breakfast in their rudimentary camp kitchen — their backs hunched against the cold wind — the rest of us gather in...
I ran into her in the East Village. I knew her from Flatbush High, but back then she was from the over-achievers, and I was...
Mahmoud Elmardi, a Sudanese visual artist and novelist, was born in 1988 in the historic city of Bahri, Khartoum—a region renowned for its rich cultural...
GJ Gillespie is a collage artist living in a 1928 farmhouse overlooking Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island, WA. A prolific artist with 23 awards to...
The first time she sees one, it is by the hidden creek, past the back field where they walk, looking for arrowheads. She is with...
In this video, I explore how I write with aphantasia. I open by asking viewers to picture a polar bear or a banana. For most...
Episodes 1 and 2 of my short documentary series Black Beyond Borders – Dakar, Senegal – can be viewed below. The series follows my six-week...
Mira Jacobs wrote an op-ed comic strip called Things I thought made sense just don’t anymore, and I raised it standing in a circle of...
I was flying from Australia to the Philippines, or perhaps to Fiji, or to Hawaii. I would have to check my notes. Due to some...
Images of pavilions, kimonos and bonsai had captured my attention since my parents returned from a trip to Japan when I was ten, dumping brochures...
In 2001, when I was twenty, my half-brother Jonathan was born. For the first time in my life, I was no longer an only child;...
As American Falls fades from my life, I find myself vainly attempting to lock its memory to a position of tenderness and beauty–backdropped by allergy-ridden...
We had fallen into a pattern of sameness. What we said, what we wore, what we did each day, down to waking at 7am, coffee...
By Vetralla, A has found an inch we didn’t pack. At first light, the foreman shows us where the plastic sheeting lifts and the ground...
Forest fires are a big problem – the smell of woodsmoke is overwhelming at the moment. I’ve had enough of others speaking for me. But...
I’m blaming the rabbits – they started the whole routine. As new arrivals in rural Arizona, we were surprised by the size of the jack...
Beneath a sky heavy with the promise of winter, Kars had arrived, not merely as a destination, but as a revelation. Angelic flakes danced beyond...
“I have a surprise,” Michael announced. “Guess where we’re going for our anniversary?”
A former “Eastern European” charts Tirana’s makeover for Western travellers—until an untouched bar reveals what Albania may have given up to join the club.
In Mumbai, when family burdens weigh heavy, two taxi drivers offer unexpected kinship.
A Black woman navigating Shanghai’s gaze—admired husband, photographed curiosity, invisible self—finds unexpected dignity in a noodle shop owner’s simple gesture of care.
Two trans travellers witness a corpse at Niagara Falls but aren’t believed—an erasure mirroring colonial borders, exploited land, and bodies deemed unworthy of dignity.
An American woman accompanies two younger male friends to Shanghai’s sex worker marketplace, confronting complicity, loneliness, and the barriers dividing women.
A budding filmmaker travelling his own country learns that to encounter a place is not to consume it, but to look, to listen, and sometimes...
She fell first in her own story and then into mine nine stories down onto a net that caught her enough to save her
I heard someone call for ‘magnetic local’ stories the more magnetic the better and I know they meant well even quoted so-and-so famous by way...
After the fourth airport in consecutive Scandinavian countries shunted me through a door labelled Nothing to Declare, I decided I couldn’t stay silent any longer,...
living in a foreign language frees you from distraction of comprehension there’s comfort in not understanding
Early morning, deep voice of sun sounding in the bronze, echo of the hands’ slow spiral. Across the field a stone barn marks a rest,...
A third for the wide sky, a third for hell, and a third for the sea—that was the deal. But high on a clifftop along...
That next morning after the three-bottle night we were supposed to leave together. I was primed for you, your mended cotton sweater soft beside my...
From the boardwalk, mid-morning February light cascades into this dense stand of cypress and tupelo – limbs gone bare save for the buds rippling the...
We never found the wolf trap hyped in our Hiking Portugal guide. It jazzed us with the blurb: Fojo do Lobo, where hunters ambushed and...
[Azaleas] Often fuchsia or plumb, sometimes white struck through by shadow. 아름다운 (Aleumdaun), I fumble. Yes, beautiful, Eun Jung nods slowly. During the war, she tells me,...
My dad begins to lose his accent. He tells me, through a sigh, that he once called this place home. After so many years away,...
You were already gone when I arrived. Only the saucer remained, a ring of coffee, and a postcard of Montmartre, half-written in a language I...
I trained myself not to look in the bathroom mirror. To glance up–safe distance, split instant–and away soft focus, screen up. I made rules: not...
where we have each travelled hours to meet, we debate the merits of goat milk versus sheep or cow, whether curds should be plain or...
I am sitting in the park crouching to spot a mockingbird, this curious cross between an opera star and car alarm, when an old Chinese...
All morning, fitting myself to the frame. Gray granite. The fixed face. Below, in high pasture, one cow, one bell—bronze, hand-hammered, worth more than the...
The crows are pinpointed poets, an exposing weave across the “lesser” London’s sky of oranges and roses. Eastern hemlock trees reach with clean brittle hands,...
Hail! That cry that’s twenty centuries old: – Not Him! – Barabbas! – Not Him! – Barabbas! echoes yet again in Jerusalem’s ancient town. At...
Hundreds ago the lifted rail line was laid to wait sloped below the cut-less green today top-noted by a rainy thinning pierce. Seeming servile, sound...
We find this place by accident, Ancient Eden with its undergrowth: Dogwoods without their crucifixion stain, Emerald-sueded fig leaves big as sin, Even myrtle blossoms...
Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881 and died in Mugins, France in 1973. Over 45 works from the Tate’s collection, alongside European...
The House of Music integrates some recent Doig paintings with sound. Central to this is project is an original Western Electric/Bell Labs sound system and...
Curators Hilary Floe and Saskia Flower have put together this Lee Miller retrospective exhibition of 200 plus photographs, including some never before printed. The exhibition...
Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955. This is his first major European exhibition. It’s a vast body of work, it’s strongly...
Gilbert and George aim to ‘bring out the bigot from inside the liberal and conversely bring out the liberal from inside the bigot’. 21st Century...
Born in 1904, son of a wealthy timber merchant, educated at Harrow and Cambridge. His fascination with glamour, high society and photography started at an...
The night is black. I can’t read your features, but I know you’re scowling. We’ve been held captive behind your blockade for the past six...
Half my life ago, in September 1995, I spent a long weekend on Ulleung Island, a remote island of about 12,000 people in South Korea,...
You don’t know who I am, but I know who you are. We share something—last week, my Peaks of the Balkans guide was your mountain...
They can seem like messages from the great beyond. From God, the universe, source, or what have you. Simultaneously, they can seem to bubble up...
At the entrance to Zambujal, a pair of dogs were waiting.
As problematic as it is to try to communicate the magnificence of a natural phenomenon through an allusion to a fictitious one, this is all...
The weekend before I turned eighteen, you convinced me to go on a crime spree. Taking advantage of this last chance to be charged as...
The church was just across the street, and the sound of its bells announcing the hour drew me across the long bedroom floor to the...
Yesterday morning, when I was sitting on the futon in my attic study, I looked across the room and saw a small star of sunlight...
The bus station in Rishikesh smells of petrol and dust, of cardamom chai poured from tin kettles. A low sun pools against the cracked asphalt...
It’s almost Valentine’s Day, sales apex for pralines, season of intact and broken hearts, when, all at once, I’m seized by an extravagance of anger.
We were cruising on the boat from our basecamp to the island of sun, sand, and wooden houses. It was 30 minutes of ocean breeze...
It’s interesting how certain places don’t just stay in memory. They rise—slow and strange—from the deep, surfacing during times of struggle, when something in us...
Living in the city (apocryphal city), you come to feel the weariness of the spirit, which should, perhaps, arrive only much later in life, not...
Sure, the platypus is a duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed, egg-laying aquatic mammal. And then there’s the story of the deer who was a cow.
Off the freeway, past clubs and courses, and tucked between the fenced sprawling lawns of Chicago’s North Shore lie fifty acres of tallgrass prairie, a...
On Venice Boulevard sits a solitary wall of orange and grey blocks at the end of an empty path. This wall leads to a pilates...
‘The Flats’ are an interzone of reclaimed land where the sea once separated the Isle of Thanet from the ‘mainland’. It is an expansive landscape,...
Sometime last month, I learnt that a river could change its length. It can feel a whole lot longer, the riverside an endless road. Or...
I open the back door for one last look at our empty yard and peer out into the noonday sun. Straight ahead are the Woods,...
November came upon me so quickly this year, and it came in such a way I felt the compulsion to write after all these years....
When word got out about the sea cows, from a marooned naturalist who’d encountered them by accident, a thirty-year countdown clock would start. That period...
Two friends flee New York City at midnight, chasing Niagara Falls. Detours through lakes, Walmart parking lots, and hollow tourist traps test their resolve—until the...
Spring renews, transforms, and uplifts us. No matter where we are, or how it appears, we notice the shift into this unpredictable season. But, how...
The Green Swamp Preserve is a harsh environment where survival requires extreme evolutionary adaptations. Here, even the plants are carnivorous. To enter this sacred place...
Open sky, more than any other bit of nature I have encountered, gives the feeling of complete connectedness to every other part of the earth....
Our first night in Rehoboth, it was grey and cloudy, though still warm. We went down to the beach together, Guy and Eric and I,...
Propelled by intuition and unsettled by the gathering shadows of global change, a couple uproots their life in search of space, soul, and sustainability. Landing...
The gravestone of my great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph Binney, and his wife, Eliza, is unremarkable: made of rough fieldstone, spotted with lichen, and of average size for...
I don’t remember if I heard the song “Wicked Game” before I saw David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, but for a while, I connected the...
A broad Scandinavian accent from a young pilot with a firm tone wakes me up, signalling the end of my blissful escape from reality in...
At the mouth of the tunnel near the uOttawa Station this man walks toward me and he talks to me follows me moves close enough...
She hummed Baby Got Back as she lifted me out of the ground. Before then, I was just a kid, hanging with a bunch of...
A distinct smell of sewage is coming from the basement. Sharon has a nose for rot. She buries half her face inside her shirt to...
This was a strange and harsh new land. The sunlight was too strong, burning skin cancer. The Trees were leafless with bleak branches pointed out...
They say if you kiss a witch, you gain the ability to win the heart of anyone. I have been searching for a witch for...
My grandma had worked in the Bureau of Scientific Resources years before I even arrived with my portfolio for a job interview. She had left...
The rain poured from the Cambodian sky, an unrelenting stream which pooled outside the door of our tiny villa near Battambang. The heaviest rain of...
What happened was, well, a tree, Douglas fir to be exact, grew up through the middle of Buck’s living room. Lives down on the corner,...
Feathery clouds cleaved the sky above into two parts. Before. And After. Vertus looked again at the cleft gouged in the ground by some unknown...
From the edge of the crowd, Jim watched Gemma climb onto a table. “Wooo! It’s Friday!” she cried, punching the air like a YouTube Zumba...
“Sneakers, sneakers. Come on. It’s gonna be a day of walking.” Moans and groans from the boys. Andy is wearing those horrible Adidas slippers he...
The airbag didn’t deploy, though it should have. I get out of the vehicle to see what I hit. My legs are numb but seem...
It started to drizzle when I approached 48th St. and Park Ave. I glanced at my watch under the raincoat sleeve. It was 6:45 pm....
The men in my town say they will pay me $1,000 if I can catch the evil spirit that has been killing our men. They...
I didn’t see the girl until the end of my run—until well after I started, actually. Her figure appeared in the spaces between the palm...
Cake is a witness to another year of survival. It seems a given, something reliable one could expect at a birthday celebration for that once-a-year mandated...
Steam fogged the car windows as I unwrapped the tamales, their heat curling into the air like incense, filling the car with the scent of...