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An Olympic journey (Peninsula, that is)
Traveling from the North Country to Seattle in February is to visit a foreign land. When I looked out the window in the Syracuse airport I saw massive piles of snow in between the runways. A few hours...
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In the book trenches
Annie Proulx, the keynote speaker at the 2014 AWP conference. Photo: U.S. Embassy in Argentina, Creative Commons, some rights reserved (Our regional book reviewer, Betsy Kepes, is covering the...
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Following the books, part 2
Seattle Gotham. Photo: PicsfromJoe (The second installment from our book-gal-on-the-scene, Betsy Kepes, covering the AWP writing conference in Seattle. Her first post is here.) I’m almost feeling like...
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Big names: last day at the AWP writing conference
Sherman Alexie, a star presenter at the conference. Photo credit, ALA. Cherry blossoms! The pruned tree leaned toward the sidewalk and I took a big gulp of the sweet perfume of the flowers. Every...
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High school kids to discuss an “adult” novel: “All the Light We Cannot See”
A crowd of book-lovers, young and old, in the NCPR studio last spring. Photo: Joel Hurd It’s spring at NCPR and time to bring a group of high school students into the studio to talk about a book. This...
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A voice from Hiroshima, seventy years after the bomb
Azusa smiles on a snowy walk in Hokkaido, March 2006 Azusa doesn’t send me many emails, maybe one every five years, so it was exciting to see her name in my Inbox. We met over thirty years ago when I...
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A lookout’s view of a western fire
The lightning strike that I saw a couple of weeks ago, an arc of energy boring into a mountainside in Idaho, is now the 24,000 acre Wash Fire. That afternoon in Coolwater Lookout, a little glass house...
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“BonjourHello” to Kingston WriterFest
On the Kingston waterfront. A gull eyes me as I eat my deli sandwich. I’m taking a lunch break from the Kingston WritersFest and I’ve found a sunny spot on a walkway along the St. Lawrence River....
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A Bookish Saturday in Kingston
Here’s an interesting thing about being at a festival that celebrates books—there’s very little time in the day to sit down and read. I left my garage lodging after the sun was up and bicycled along...
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Letters Home: Betsy Kepes hears the good news in church with Jimmy Carter
Jimmy and Roselyn Carter and Betsy Kepes at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. A lizard ran across the floor this morning during the short chapel service that begins the day here at Koinonia...
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Photo essay: The photography of war
From the section “Nature.” Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times/Redux. From “War is Beautiful” by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books. For a few years in the 1980s David Shields was a...
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Letters Home: A Gringa in Costa Rica, pt. 1
Part one – Heliconias Lodge – Swinging Bridges and Monkeys People from northern New York know about living on the edge, that it takes a long time to get to our homes from the rest of the world but that...
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Letters Home: A Gringa in Costa Rica, pt. 2
Part Two – Heliconias Lodge – Sign language and the dumb Gringa It is very uncomfortable to be speechless. I often make money by writing strings of words and I can fumble my way through a conversation...
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Letters Home: A Gringa in Costa Rica, pt. 3
Tapirs, Monkeys and Frogs It’s Saturday morning and we have the day off. After breakfast – rice and beans – the five of us gather water bottles and a few oranges. The volunteers at Heliconias Lodge now...
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Letters Home: A Gringa in Costa Rica, pt. 4
White Sand, Brown Pelicans, and Our Daily Walk to Nowhere On our last weekend in Costa Rica we walk down to Bihagua from Heliconias Lodge to catch a bus to the small city of Liberia. Our actual...
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Letters Home: Betsy Kepes in New Zealand, pt. 1
Rob Roy Glacier. Photo: Tom Vandewater Tramping in the Southern Alps of New Zealand The tourist town of Wanaka reminded me of Lake Placid as we pedaled through streets jammed with tourists and past...
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Letters Home: Betsy Kepes in New Zealand, pt. 2
A long ride on the Central Otago Rail Trail For a long-distance cyclist, 150 miles of scenic, almost flat road cleared of cars and trucks is a dream ride. Add in roadside cafes that serve tea and...
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Letters Home: Betsy Kepes in New Zealand, pt. 3
The Smell of Turnips – a Cyclist’s View of New Zealand Agriculture Betsy Kepes amid fields and hedges, next to a cabbage tree. One of my New Zealand friends teaches horticulture. Another one owns a...
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Letters Home: Betsy Kepes in New Zealand, pt. 4
Memorial notes commemorate 5-year anniversary of devastating earthquake. Photo: Tom Vandewater The human aftershocks of the Christchurch earthquake On our short flight from Auckland to Christchurch I...
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Letters Home: A thousand-year-old walking trail, the 88 temples of Shikoku
Photo: Tom Vandewater We’ve been walking for six days now, at every corner looking for the trail sign, a pilgrim in a big straw hat. People who follow this ancient circular route of 1,100 kilometers...
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