I went to Santo Domingo, a sweltering, smoggy metropolis on the edge of a half-island in the Caribbean, as part of my undergraduate university’s study abroad programme. That summer, I learned how to eat mashed plantain with onions and cooking oil drizzled on top, how to dance merengue as fast as humanly possible, how to tell the difference between bufea, bufeas, and bufeáis, which isn’t ever really used and sounds funny.
...On my way to work on Friday, 5th October, 2016, I used the rough path leading to the main road from my house on Quarry Road. I contended with a number of things, the dryness for one, as the wind encouraged dust to rise with every movement and cleave to passersby like me. Another thing was the heat, unaccompanied by its usual end of the year twin, the harmattan haze. The air was like the bottom of a steam pressing iron: morning, afternoon and night, the skin distressed from it. I thought how much less oppressive it would be if there were more trees in this town.
...It is Samhain, the threshold between summer and winter, light and dark, this world and the otherworld, and I am standing at the top of a hill in Teampall Chaomhan* graveyard on Inis Oírr, looking out across Galway Bay towards Connemara’s green mountains, Na Beanna Beola, the Twelve Bens. Inis Oírr is the smallest of the Aran islands, just three-square miles.
...I’ve often thought that the interview is a separate genre of literature, right up the with the trio of poetry, prose and drama, above ‘genre’ in the narrow American sense where just about everything gets the label. There is dialogue so there are elements of drama. It is written in sentences, with each response forming an integrated whole, in the manner of a short story, something capable of explication. Lastly, an interview where participants have struck a balance is a perfect thing akin to verse.
...Edward parked his car with care. The Hofburg palace loomed to his right against a gray and star-less sky. A stray dog lifted its leg at a lamp-post. He heard the trickle of urine. A puff of steam rose from the gutter. It was nearly freezing.
...Please review the submissions and current calls pages on the website for current guidelines. In general, any submission should be submitted using the following specifications herein. Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature uses British English spelling and typically follows British grammatical styles. Our main aim is to present clear copy so that the reader can focus on the piece’s message. Above all, be surprising and clever in words and material. Be concise in prose. Show you have excellent command of your writing and grammar before you start to break the rules. Break the rules only when it enhances your written thoughts.
...How exciting to see the new dawning of a new day at Panorama in a moment when travel and travel writing are undergoing a long-overdue reckoning. When it launched, Panorama journal was ahead of its time. The magazine was truly global and not just in its destinations. It wasn’t interested in rehashing the usual travel tropes from the usual travel writing suspects. It dared to suggest that travel writers could and should be people of the global majority and that we could write not only about our own corners of the world but also look back at the USA, Australia and Europe, the very centers that had dominated travel writing and publishing and thereby defined the “foreign”.
...The first language I heard was Arabic. I am sure of it although I don’t actually remember. I do know the endearments toward babies, ill children, old people, and pretty women had always been delivered in my parents’ tongue. My mother cuddled infant nieces cooing, “ya eaynay, ya ruhi, habibti.” They proclaimed a gentle and awed rapture at seeing the baby—my eyes, my soul, sweet darling. Nothing in English could equal the loving list of endearments, and those words of connection. MY heart, MY eyes… Arabic was not only chosen to honor the child, but the phrases also elevated them.
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