Category: Nonfiction
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A Literary Prize
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The small gods visit us softly. So soft, sometimes, it’s possible we miss their presence altogether. Two weeks passed before I noted the happy trespass of one such deity through my recent gloom. The first inkling appeared last week, good news arriving to my in-box from another writer, a former professor, writing mentor, and current…
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Mumbai (Slight Return)
This week I spent a few days in an old haunt. Strange, wonderful, electric Maximum City, arriving here six years ago I boarded a train with my wife and sons destined for Mumbai’s iconic Victoria Terminus and, from there, the Gateway of India. Strange city then, you hustled us into the railcar, we all full…
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Without a Country
Just that morning, without a visa, I’d talked my way across the border. A little patience, a little humility, small Kwacha, and Dunhill cigarettes solved the visa problem.
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Around the World & Right Here
I would visit corners of this strange land not unlike my hometown: unknown and invisible to the world, no place of pride on any map, unsung in the guide books. Places nobody came from and nobody went to. Corn farms. Tobacco farms.
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Travel Writing on Kingdoms
All travel writing is essentially the same. The essence shifts away from plot and in favor of setting.
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Technical Writing and SEO
Against considerations of writing as craft, technical concepts get 1.5 stars, distracting from the fundamental purpose of writing: to communicate, to inform, to entertain, to share emotion and feeling and intent in some kind of visual, potentially permanent, way.
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Learning to Drive
I learned to drive like I learned to shoot: a golf cart can’t be so different from a bb gun, can it? With the golf cart you’ve got two pedals and a wheel. With the bb gun, you’ve got two sights and a trigger. My poor son. He’s learning to drive on a 12-year-old stick…
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Where Fact Meets Fiction
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My personal journeys work best as parody. I am a very unserious traveler. I board the train for the potato cutlet, not the arrival in Bangaluru.
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Review: If You Turn to Look Back
We’re with him now, vibrant present looking back at blurry past, teased as much from this vital trip as from old photos, journals, and letters. He has three more stops to make.
Ben East Books 