Category Archives: Uncategorized

September 11

Great Home Chefs

My freelance writing career has been typically feast or famine. This September I am feasting. In addition to the Maisonneuve piece I mentioned in my last post, and a story about Tangier in this month’s Westworld Magazine, I wrote the cover story in today’s Swerve Magazine. In it, I profile five great amateur chefs of […]

Mightily, the Overflood

I was going through some of my old travel journals and came across this little gem. These are tasting notes for Vinium Karalahna, a wine my wife and I drank plenty of during our honeymoon on the Turkish Island of Bozcaada: “Profound ruby red with violet tints allures to stare at it into depth and […]

Walls Book Update

I am still working on my walls book. Those who have been following my blog already know I’ve spent much of the last two years abroad conducting research for the book. So far I’ve visited Algeria, Morocco, the Western Sahara, Ceuta and Melilla, northeast India, Kashmir, Israel, Palestine and Cyprus. Starting in mid-August I will […]

After a long silence

I arrived home from Cyprus in May and have spent so much time hustling for freelance writing jobs that I have neglected this blog. It has been a strange few months. By the time I returned home my grant funding had dried out, I didn’t have a bartending job anymore, and my writer’s residecy would […]

March 23

Walking through the Dead Zone

After spending five weeks amid Palestine’s daily despair, the divisions here in Nicosia seem almost quaint by comparison. The forty year-old conflict between the Turkish North and Greek South has lost all of its heat and momentum, but entrenched feelings of betrayal and distrust keep it going. There is some talk in the newspapers about […]

March 14

Barbed Wire in Bethlehem

I went to Bethlehem to photograph some of the graffiti on the Wall – which I did – but found myself more enamoured with the coils of concertina that is everywhere. Perhaps I have seen too much of it in the past year, but there is an aesthetic to barbed wire that I find beautiful […]

The Walls of East Jerusalem

Today I took a tour with an Israeli-Palestinian NGO called Ir–Amim to visit Jerusalem’s backyards and unholy places. A bus carried a crowd of mostly foreigners around East Jerusalem to show the impacts of the Wall. I had been looking forward to hearing about the Wall from an Israeli perspective and was surprised that our […]

March 14

Sending a Message

The fingers on Yusuf’s right hand are sore and black. “Some spray cans are more finger-friendly,” he says, and he should know. He finds a broken bottle on the ground, with the bottle cap still on the neck, and discovers it fits perfectly on his spray-finger. The ad hoc prosthetic will make the painting easier. […]

March 08

A Zoo in Palestine

The rain and wind has stopped and it is spring again in Palestine, and I feel good. For me, it is not really traveling unless I can feel the sun warm my face. Perhaps this is a Canadian thing. I traveled to Qalqilya the other day, a city in the northern West Bank. Qalqilya is […]

Lamenting a Lonely Planet

I found an interesting article about travel and guidebooks by author Stephen Henighan in the very excellent Geist Magazine. You can find it here.