Mountains, music, craft beer, eclectic food, and free spirits. Let me just start with this: if you haven’t been to Asheville before, I highly, highly …
Adventures in Asheville, NC: A Solo Trip in the Blue Ridge Mountains
Random Coffee-Fueled Musings
Why You Don’t Need to Justify Being a Vegetarian
When I was about eleven, one of my best friends told me that she was a vegetarian. She didn’t eat meat, and she made sure …
Discovering Favorite Places in a New City
For me, it’s always about the cafés when I travel someplace new or am looking for a new haunt near home. Parks, bookstores, maybe a …
A Year Reading Hemingway
Okay, Here goes. This is to follow up on my post from last week, where I wrote, in parentheses, “And I want to read all …
Rediscovering Literature
I never read The Great Gatsby in high school. Nor did I read The Color Purple. Or Lord of the Flies. Emma. Fahrenheit 451. Great …
Eating Dinner Alone in a Restaurant
The first time it happened, I think, was in 2008, in a place called Dornbirn, Austria. I had visited friends in Germany for a few …
Learning to Love Reading Again During Grad School
It’s a warm day in May 2013. I’m sitting in an office at my university, going on about the year’s worth of history books I’ve …
New Year, New & Old Writing
I’ve always been a writer. I was that kid who wrote my own versions of stories after reading the classics, who folded and stapled papers …
A Different Kind of Hometown Weekend: Gaining New Appreciation for the Places We Grew Up
I didn’t spend my first weekend completely alone in my childhood home until I was twenty-eight years old. Bizarre, I know, that it took that …
A Dog-Eared Copy of Jane Eyre
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” That first line–and dozens of others–from Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece are permanently etched in my …