Term: Issue 08: Space
Explore all pages categorised under the heading Issue 08: Space below.
All categories can be seen on the main index page.
The Seven-Year Itch
Becca tells me it has a name, and it’s the seven-year itch. Then a grouse flies up from the dirt road, startled by the pickup...
Dark Matter
Dark Matter by Granville Carroll is an artist’s book about darkness and light, the infinity of the cosmos and the divine, big bangs and subtle...
An Illusion
I stopped at the Ömeriye hamam on my walk back from Nicosia’s northern, Turkish side. The Ottomans built the bathhouse, but today it stands on...
Neowise, the Comet
Because it goes on, over and over, you can never say you’re halfway there. Six thousand, seven hundred years then swinging back to the cold....
Balm
From my three small rooms I’ve gotten to dome growth, fireweed, slough views, a porch like a theater seat to a sharpened sunset. After the...
Eating Chifa For the First Time
I step foot on Calle Capón, one hand on my saddlebag dangling across my left shoulder. It’s half past noon, my second week in Lima....
Decolonising Travel Introduction
From the size of this issue, it’s clear that the evocative (and elastic) theme of Space resonated with many. When I first heard it, my...
Postcards Home
My mother and I live in a state of space — both physically, and emotionally. This is a travel series dedicated to her.
Three Places
As we drive into the country in her electric car, we look into the sky, so dark and starless, and silent. Perhaps to fill the...
The Mushroom King
The wait is hard when you count time in memories. But linger long enough, and the Mushroom King will emerge. Ears in the branches, hands...
The Carnival of the Word
Whisky and a shop window – Thanks, Marriott! The gloomy, excited crowd passes by and recalls to me Goya’s blackest period and the lethargic mind...
Space Junk
Everything my family ever threw away floats in outer space, in the voids between galactic superclusters. The apple core, the pizza crust, the Little Mermaid...
Sameba 2019
Retreating through trellises of grapes growing woven through rubber bands; through the rose garden, fragrance hanging ancient in the beading humidity – I snapped the...
Plantation
banana banana banana banana banana, road an endless slender fruit between, banana banana banana banana banana, fields kilometer after kilometer between, banana banana banana banana...
Lizard of Possibility
I heard a sound in our garden last night. A dragging shuffling sound – an animal sound. Not angry but busy. Rushing. Inexplicable, zoological.
I Sing of Rivers (for ẹlẹ́yẹlé and Asejìrẹ́)
River does not discriminate; I fetch the breath of ẹlẹ́yẹlé into my palms, offer it a Haven in the corner of a slave’s mouth. It’s...
Saturn Bar Ghazal
Saturn Bar Ghazal-mod night dance party, my man, my man, peace, love and granola are gonna be there tonight at the Saturn Bar. Where the...
From Belgrade
My movie is a page. Then someone opens a blind and we briefly return to where we are: 60,000 meters over Europe. The condensation-trails of...
Corresponding with Stars
I spoke with the solar system about the study-abroad program for women who hear the world in minor notes. I have an unbreakable attention span...
Broken Antennae
Your voice rises above the street sounds. The full moon sits on your right shoulder, Octavia Butler on your left trying to divine the future....
Bernadotte
At the footbridge I watch the great grey heron nosing about at the bankside and the river stretching away beyond and the river emphasizes itself...
The Idiom
Swirling a glass of wine at the bar, I silently rehearse the question du jour for my bartender-friend, Réjean, on my final night in Rouen....
Fifteen Stones
My childhood best friend travelled to Rome with her family when we were thirteen, and brought me back two film canisters, one black, one opaque...
Bucket List
There are some things I absolutely refuse to do again. The list is astoundingly short and may surprise you. I will never go to a...
My Father Not Yet My Father
I pulled on the rope cord that hung from the ceiling, and the attic steps yawned open with a creak and a groan. My sister...
Foreign Puzzle
Foreign Puzzle is an intimate documentary that explores interior space and its external manifestation through movement [in space] to communicate that which cannot be expressed...
The Homeland or Something Like That
My grandmother adored Ronald Reagan. As a child, I just took this to be one of her many idiosyncrasies, along with the very deliberate way...
The Tempest of Belluno
The sun peeks through green leaves and branches, encasing the dome beneath the canopy in a brilliant light show. With every gentle touch of the...
Ocean Rage
Since the start of my career in 2000, I’ve worked and travelled all over the world. In Europe, the Middle East, South and Central Asia,...
NASA STS-72 Mission
America’s fleet of space shuttle orbiters were in service for 30 years, but after 135 missions the era of the NASA space shuttle has now...
Memory Scrubbing
As Russia continues to lay siege to the offices, archives, and staff of human rights organisation Memorial, we share this documentary that explores the origins...
I’m Not Invisible
Those of us who can afford our own personal space find ourselves in a relatively privileged position. We enjoy the privilege of being able to...
Extinction Beckons
Mike Nelson, is an internationally acclaimed British artist, born 1967 in Loughborough, he works in London. Extinction Beckons is a major exhibition, which includes sculptural...
Too Early For Birdsong
We operate inside a structure much bigger than us, so very old and grand, we deem ourselves minuscule, irrelevant, crushed under the weight of history....
Book Excerpt: The Waters of Manila Bay are Never Silent
What could be more peaceful or romantic than walking along a beach and watching the sun dip into the horizon, the sky a beautiful haze...
The Space In Their Lives I Had Left Behind
“… you remained misunderstood because you could not speak the language well enough. One learned to accept the frustration of not being able to express...
Book Review: The Shards
In the 594 pages of The Shards, the enfant terrible Bret Easton Ellis inhabits an excessive amount of space to recount a ‘fusion of fact...
Book Review: The Passenger
Infinity. Can’t be drawn. Can’t be said. Can’t be imagined. Couldn’t be grasped even if you could blindly feel around its edges. But it’s there....
Book Excerpt: The Middle Daughter
Within six months Mother not only buys the land, she also builds what she calls her ‘dream clinic’. Even for Mother, it is an incredible...
Book Excerpt: Peony Vertigo
I stole from you a noun hijacked a verb, I declared I’m mostly female, a peony in the mouth of spring, too late, I’ve constructed...
Book Excerpt: Halcyon Journey
Join me inside a camouflaged turkey-hunting blind as I observe a pair of skittish belted kingfishers feeding their chicks tucked deep in an earthen burrow...
Sylvie and the Wild Boar
Sylvie had been my best friend since we were thirteen. She was always the baby to my boss, and each of us had always been...
Rats in Her Attic
I don’t remember the first time I met her. Surely, on either of my two previous visits to that dingy apartment, I must have seen...
Duino Castle and Rainer Maria Rilke
I have never met you. How could I have? You died twenty-seven years before I was born. That is why I am at Duino Castle...
Variations on a Highway
I’m remembering how it felt, being a child confined in the back seat of a car with nothing to do. Curled tight as a dozing...
The Starry Night
As the door slams shut behind me, the blare of CNN is mercifully replaced by the chirping of crickets. A cool breeze dances across my...
Mangoes in the Monsoon, Free in Bali
There is a specific moment of time when the Earth converges with the Heavens. The heat is heavy, and the rain is rolling in. There...
Interment
I’m on the other side of a century. I was wandering over the crest of a hill and had just passed something for which I...
Equal Magic
NONE OF IT was expected. Not the move to Edinburgh from London, the steady civil service job after years of misery. Not the mildest winter,...
Becoming The Waiting-Nothing
Nandi, the bull-guru of Shaiva Siddhanta’s eight disciples; the trusted vahana and steadfast guardian of that great destroyer, Lord Shiva, greeted me, first, as I...
Counting the Stars
After living in 12 different houses over the course of 50 years, I realised that the way to appraise space is to discover how it...
Putting My Body on a Mumbai Train
The train was approaching. The adrenaline kicked into my system. We were joining the commuters in their daily crossing of Thane Creek from Old Mumbai...
Notes from a Once Large Planet
The first letter I ever wrote to a magazine was to volunteer to be sent to a space colony so Planet Earth could be relieved...
I Am the Space Between That Which I Do and Do Not Know
I let go of my family who purchased me, with hopes of connecting with my family who sold me to them. I find myself considering,...
Girl/Body as Theory of Space-Time
To recontextualize the violence of the body (this is especially the case with bodies called ‘girl’) is a difficult task requiring strong legs, loose hips,...
Cord
The hooks in my chest are tethered to a bungee cord that is clipped to a ring hanging from the ceiling. I lean back, past...
1510
When I meet new people, they ask me what words I know and I say what sounds like, luego, so I pronounce the word as,...
Where Have you Been?
I had to get out – to get some air. I’ve been lost inside something, inside something strange, inside myself, in the small rooms that...
The Olive Theory
“It’s almost time to close your eyes.” Oisín shifted down into third gear, letting the car roll through the winding hills of Malin Beg. Niamh...
The Librarian’s Flame, or Alexandria
The pale, blue horizon was covered in a searing mist. The late summer humidity cast a mirage of white fog over the northerly, African city....
El Escritor
Once there was a writer who lived in Mexico City who despaired of his calling. Most days he rose toward noon and went for a...
Beware of Wildlife
Rick—my girlfriend’s dad—turned purple in the driver’s seat of the minivan, a rental whose timing belt screeched like a tortured cat the entire fifty miles...
That Beautiful White Space
It’s late April in northern Arizona and the weather is fussy and finicky as spring struggles to throw off the chill and influence of winter....
Space between Breaths
I come from metal, from shaky steps, from air. I arrived as a newborn at 2 years and 9 months old. I could say Umma...
End of the Line
At about seven years old, I got the notion stuck in my head that I was going to go to jail. I never brought it...
It All Means Everything
South across the river, it was rising over the silhouettes of trees to fill the sky. It was close, seemed to be getting closer, and...
Wherever in the Blazes
Every pilgrim is familiar with trail blazes, and for long-distance walkers of any brand waymarking is something of an unreflective activity. But during the pilgrimage...
To the Hiker who Showed Me the Meadow of Wild Chives
From the peaks of the Rocky Mountains in Montana, you immediately understand why this American state has earned itself the nickname of “Big Sky” country....
Reservoir
There are spaces that hold magic, spaces that can create their own stories and lore, spaces where the veil is a little thinner. Crater Lake/Gii-was...
Of Roots and Pillars
Pillars came before wheels. They decorated temples in Turkey more than 11,000 years ago, they held aloft roofs in Gujarat 4500 years ago but that...
Moon Rock
Through the entrance of the chalk pits, space seems to expand, and the sky opens wider as I approach. The quarry forms a crater, opening...
Gossip Girls
The air was sticky as we navigated the bumpy back roads of the village of Ban Tuek in Thailand. I was about to volunteer to...
Foundlings: Trees I’ve Known Along the Way
There is a space between trees, a distance between where the tips of their branches touch and the light shines through. This space between living...
Eulsuko Island
My migratory path to the Nakdong River began on a peninsula well over five thousand miles to the east roughly hewn to the same latitude....
Buzz Off!
The Colorado Plateau is known for its triad of flying, buzzing pests: cedar gnats, biting black flies, and mosquitoes. On a recent trip, the mosquitoes...
Animal Gaze
To tell you that the Parisian apartment I shared with my family for a year was cramped would be an injustice to small things. Our...
Alaska: Final Call
Taking your eighty-something parents on an Alaskan cruise may not be as demanding as climbing Denali or crossing the Yukon by dogsled, yet my sister...
Map of Hope and Sorrow: In Conversation with Helen Benedict
I recently chatted with Helen Benedict about her latest book, MAP OF HOPE AND SORROW, co-authored with Syrian writer and refugee, Eyad Awwadawnan, an in-depth...
Book Review: All The Honey
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, San Miguel County Colorado’s first poet laureate and Western Slope Colorado Poet Laureate, is a contemplative, committed, insightful poet. After dedicating more...
Issue 8: Space
Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’s SPACE issue. From the very small to the enormity of our imaginations, essays grow from...