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Panorama emphasises writing and the visual arts created with a deep intelligence, reconnecting us to the world. Thank you for considering submitting your work to our journal, and we look forward to reading your submission.

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Sunday Magazine: 09.10.16

Welcome to our new weekly Sunday Magazine. Each Sunday, we’ll bring you selected works from around the world, from travel poetry to fiction to photography. This week, we begin with our new series, Eaten, which pairs travel with gastronomy, in an essay by South African writer Ishay Govender-Ympa.

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Bio: Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee

“Exciting food and travel writing invites the reader to an open seat at the global dining table. It doesn’t look with an exotic gaze into someone else’s cuisine. It isn’t about romanticising the killing of a goat or presenting rituals as some kind of alien ceremony. Sharing a meal on the road, be it a can of tomato soup in an empty hostel or an elaborate feast in a sunlit garden, is a way to communicate without the need for a shared language. Food is an equaliser, a bridge, a connector. We want Panorama to be an invitation to that open table—to bridge that gap between cultures, people and language. We cannot argue when our mouths are full.“

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Weekend Reading: Blue cheese blues

My brother and I waited until we knew we were alone, and darted into the little pantry. The old fridge hummed and hissed and gurgled as the ice-water compartment jiggled its innards. That’s what we — me at age eight, and my brother, almost six — thought it sounded like then. Gently, I eased the fridge door open, waiting for the seal to release like an octopus relaxing the suction pads on a tentacle fastened to its prey. A satisfying ploop sound followed.

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Weekend Reading: Food for the inner child

My first meaningful encounter with food took place on the French Riviera in the summer of 1991. I don’t remember it, but the story has been told to me countless times. It happened as I, a toddler with a short temper and a shrill voice, had just convinced my parents to feed me whatever was available in the car we were in; in that case, a piece of a Snickers bar.

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Sunday Magazine: 23.10.16

Welcome to the third installment of our Sunday Magazine, the perfect literary accompaniment to your weekend. In this issue, our Gastronomy Editor, Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee offers up her story on Kimchee Pizza in Los Angeles for our Eaten series; Irish writer Padraig Rooney follows the trail of Byron and Hobhouse in the Bernese Oberland; Contributing Writer Maria Wiesner tracks the trails of British traveller Edith Durham; and American poets Kevin Cutrer and Elizabeth Schultz allow us to travel alongside them through their poems.

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Weekend Reading: Jesus, Uno, Kimchi Pizza

It was the start of a three-day Memorial Day weekend. I stood there leaning on the counter, watching my folks’ forest green Lincoln Continental pull out of the parking lot in slow motion. The sun glistened on the chrome, while my dad’s bald head shone from the passenger seat. I could hear their friends laughing from the back seat, probably at one of my mom’s jokes. They were leaving for a long weekend to the Grand Canyon.

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Weekend Reading: Cool Enough

Roll. Pinch. Smash. Roll. All in one swift smooth motion, a chef rolled dough into cylinders, pinched off equally-sized chunks, smashed each with the palm of his hand, then used a thin rolling pin to shape round wrappers, thick in the middle, thin on the edge.

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Weekend Reading: Never Say Never

Over 1,200 years ago, disgruntled Norse Viking sailed northward and started a new society, complete with a parliament, on an island they called Snæland, “land of snow.” Just as they were called to that improbable, frozen place, so was I. I went to Iceland for the vistas, for the endless daylight, for the feeling of being on another planet. I went there to be alone, small against the bigness of mountains and ocean. I did not go there to eat.

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Weekend Reading: Burrata in Chinatown

From my seat at the kitchen table, I watched my mother pick up a bright red pepper from her baking sheet, its skin shrivelled and scorched in several places after being roasted in the oven for nearly an hour. She held it from its bottom with both hands over a large glass bowl, and gently tore it in half. Warm pepper juice poured into the bowl along with some seeds that she would remove later. She peeled off the burned skin, and broke apart the flesh into pieces, which she also placed into the bowl.

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Weekend Reading: The Taste of Healing

At the age of 28, in 1992, I was told I had HIV and maybe “a good five years” to live. By the time the autumn of 2008 rolled around, I’d outlived my use-by date three times over, and then some. Not only had my body remarkably held it together without need for treatment or medical intervention, the HIV had never even begun to conquer my immune system. In the previous five years, however, another culprit – stress – had taken hold, and the damage was irreversible.

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Weekend Reading: When the Cock Crows

“You shouldn’t have done it,” whispered the willowy brunette standing across from me. She was staring at the book she held in her hands, not even able to look me in the eye.

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Open: Bola Nuts

The sun was hot on the back of my neck. Hunger stretched and yawned like an expectant embryo needing nourishment in my belly. I unwrapped the plantain from the newspaper, the smell teased my nostrils. Boli roasted plantain, was usually eaten with palm oil, sold on the streets wrapped in paper. The groundnuts were in the second wrap of the newspaper. The trick was to break off a bit of plantain and follow it up with the nuts, that way, the sweetness of the roasted plantain blended with the savoury saltiness of the roasted nuts.

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Seen: Partition, Migration and Immigration as Travel Stories: Stories of Three Women Who Wro(i)te

Where I come from, we talk about distance in memories. Remember when your mother tied the suitcase with a chain to the railway berth so the riff-raff couldn’t steal it when you traveled cross-country from Delhi to Kolkata? Do you remember how hot the train ride was? Or the samosas we bought at the bus station—the ones with whole coriander seeds and spicy potatoes? Not the Bengali kind with peanuts but the North Indian kind, the kind that made our tongues swell because of the green chilies but which were so addictive? Distance isn’t kilometers or miles. Distance is how far we have moved away from what was home. Or how far one’s home is now we have moved elsewhere and perhaps made new homes. How far away was that world? How foreign does home feel now? Where is home and where is home now? Where I come from, a country of migrants, a country of immigrants, we talk of distance in memories.

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Seen: Adventures in the French Digestive Tract

The cliché is that the French are obsessed with sex. But I would argue that if the French, and Parisians in particular, are fixated on anything, it is, rather, their digestion. Farfetched as it may, at first, appear, Paris being densely populated and most Parisian habitats consequently being as compact and tightly packed together as the inner organs, stairways and elevators metaphorically recapitulate the function of the organism, stirring in the ascent, digestive in the descent.

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Seen: Bitter Melon in Oregon

A tropical to subtropical vine, bitter melon (Momordica charantia) is one of the more challenging plants I attempt in our short growing season in northeastern Oregon. Early June storms often threaten as I poke the seeds into the soil. I hope for rain to soak our garden one more time before the dry summer sets in. But mist rolling through the canyons and thunder cracking over nearby ridges could also herald a cold front pushing in from the North. At 3800 feet, that could bring late frost or leaf-shredding hail. Despite the odds for failure, I persist. Amid ponderosa pines and cattle ranches, I wait and watch for the first bitter melon sprouts and think of another home more than 7000 miles and two decades away.

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Lost: The Essence of Bourdain

In the aftermath of a catastrophe, such as a suicide, it is so much easier to be reminiscent and melancholy. We wallow in the why and why not, talk about the day of, and the day after. Where an entire society shares the tragedy, you might wonder where you were and what you were doing when you first heard what happened. The specificity of the feeling assumes great importance and comes up for review when we encounter profound loss. This is what it was for us, with the death some weeks ago of the much beloved Anthony Bourdain.

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Lost: Tacos Arabes

In the late 1990s, my husband and I moved to Guadalajara, Mexico as he was attending the local medical school. In our early twenties, California-raised children of Iraqi immigrants, we were both curious and delighted when we heard about a Tacos Arabes stand that had opened a short drive from our apartment.

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Lost: Losing, Lost, Finding, Found

The compass originates in China during the Han Dynasty (2nd c BC-1st c AD), and was called a “south-governor,” used not for navigation but fortune telling. How have the stars aligned for me? In his 1088 AD “Dream Pool Essays,” Chinese polymath Shen Kuo is the first to describe a magnetic needle compass: the needle’s tip rubbed with lodestone and then suspended from a single strand of silk. How to find my true North?

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