Not long after it opened in the late 1980s, I journeyed the Karakoram Highway, through a region encased in amber, from northern Pakistan to Kashgar...
Horror isn’t always what you think it is—it comes in many shapes and colours, and often when we least expect it. I hopped on a...
There’s a light that is particular to Chihuahuan desert of West Texas, to which the town of Marfa belongs, that has less to do with...
I’ve moved back to Belfast, Northern Ireland. I left the family home for good when I was 19, left my city then too and eventually...
Sometimes the people you need to meet are the ones you bring with you.
When I saw her
Hidden, in plain view
My mother, the...
If anything has shaken me fully free from childhood desires to see the world as a concrete-mould, comprehensible place, a planet where all questions have...
The day I learned to travel was the first time I ever was truly lost.
It was 1979 and I was nine years old. Surely,...
Dan Lagunzad was a botanist: he was built slim and thrumming, like a low, springy tree that was just a little bit taller than I...
Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse were university chums. Hobby had been best man at Byron’s unlikely and short-lived wedding to Annabella Milbanke in 1815,...
It was in the town of Shkodra, in northern Albania, that I first picked up the name Edith Durham. Strolling the streets in the dry...
I look at the traffic, coming in droves from all sides: mopeds, taxis, pick-up trucks, and bicycles. The mopeds are the most impressive; some solely...
The plane coming down, and sheer headiness is in me. I will now be on Canadian soil! The noise is overwhelming… we’re about to land...
A traveller by definition is a person far from home, and as such, is receptive to a never-ending stream of impressions roused by the strange....
This is where you could have died when you were four. Your tiny body smashed against the tree trunk, your back bent into an impossible...
It’s 1989, my brother’s fourth birthday. We all huddle together on Towan Beach, our backs against the autumn sea-gusts, and anoint him with headphones and...
I am surrounded by a few thousand strangers, yet they are my family. I adopted myself into this community of black and blue the day...
The thunder and lightning crash so hard around my home it knocks paintings from the wall and tchotchkes to the floor. A wall of rain...
Less than 9km from Mount Vesuvius, near the entrance to Pompeii, a vendor sells bottles resembling penises. The corked bottles are red, white, blue, and...
I wore my Afrodelik Designs shirt by a Toronto-based designer Dezi Dee. It depicts the profile of a black woman, outlined in white on a...
Every time I go home to El Dorado, Arkansas, I can’t seem to fight the feeling that someone or something is trying to kill me....