BUST magazine article

May 29th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

I’ve got a feature article about the birth control pill in the current issue of BUST. I’m a huge fan of the magazine  so I’m thrilled to be part of it this month.  Go get a copy and get your feminism on…

Happy Tuesday.

Time to Travel

May 14th, 2012 § 1 Comment

So it’s almost summer and that means it’s nearly time for me to pick up and get the expletive out of Manhattan – a city that becomes unbearably muggy and overheated during the warmest months of the year. (Just take the subway any day in July if you want to see dozens of utterly miserable strangers.)  In just a few short weeks, I’m headed to Australia!

If you’ve read TGGGTGL, you’re familiar with my friend Carly and her parents. I’ll be taking up space in their Sydney guest room some eight years after I first showed up with too much luggage and an overblown fear of Australian spiders/snakes/sharks – pretty much any creature that starts with the letter “s.” I can’t wait to reunite with one of my favorite cities and favorite families.

In anticipation of getting my travel/travel writing on, I’m posting this recent Ted talk by Lavinia Spalding, writer and editor of The Women’s Best Travel Writing (there’s a 2012 volume out soon). I found it totally inspiring.

Happy travels.

McSweeney’s!

April 19th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Very excited to learn that my recent McSweeney’s piece is being anthologized in their new collection. Writing it could barely be called work and I hope it entertains you. Happy Thursday.

Philadelphia

April 9th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

I’ll be in Philadelphia this Wednesday. Hope to see you there!

TRAVEL WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY

a panel discussion featuring
DAVID FARLEY
MATT GROSS
RACHEL FRIEDMAN

moderated by 2011-2012 ArtsEdge Resident Rolf Potts

Wednesday, April 11, at 6:00 PM in the Arts Café
Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk
No registration required – this event is free & open to the public

__________________________________________TRAVEL WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY: A panel discussion about the art, ethic, and vocation of literary and commercial travel writing in the Information Age

DAVID FARLEY is the author of the award-winning travel book An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town (Penguin, 2010). He’s a Contributing Editor at AFAR magazine and also writes for the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Geographic Traveler, and Gadling.com. He teaches travel writing at New York University.

MATT GROSS is a travel and food writer who contributes publications such as Saveur, World Hum, and the New York Times, where he wrote the Frugal Traveler column from 2006 to 2010. His newest series of travel dispatches for the New York Times is called “Getting Lost.”

RACHEL FRIEDMAN is the author of The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure (Bantam Books, 2011). It was a Target Breakout Book and selected by Goodreads’ readers as one of the best travel books of 2011. A graduate (B.A., M.A.) of the University of Pennsylvania, she loved being part of the Kelly Writers House Fellows program, where she got to rub elbows with Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, and Walter Bernstein.

ROLF POTTS has reported from over sixty countries for dozens of major venues, including National Geographic Traveler, The New Yorker, Outside, Slate.com, National Public Radio, and the Travel Channel. Rolf is perhaps best known for promoting the ethic of independent travel, and his book on the subject, Vagabonding, has been through thirteen printings and translated into several foreign languages. His newest book is Marco Polo Didn’t Go There.

Happy Birthday to The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost

March 31st, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Today my book is one year old! It’s been a great year and I want to thank everyone who bought/read/spread the word about my travel memoir.  Couldn’t have done it with you.

 

Philadelphia Travel Panel

March 14th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

I’ll be back at my alma mater (UPenn) on 4/11 for a travel writing panel with Rolf Potts, David Farley, Matt Gross, and Jason Wilson. These are awesome writers and I’m totally excited in an overtly uncool way to be invited to participate.

If you’re in the Philadelphia area, I hope to see you there!

Literary Voyages

February 17th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

I’m a little late in reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s NY Times piece on Ireland, but my day is better for finally getting around to it. I was on the hook from his first sentence, really: “Ireland starts for me with the end of “The Dead,” which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.”  Yes, I thought, me too.

And then when he describes the text his father read from, “excellent forest green is the cover of “The Portable James Joyce,” my mother’s Penguin paperback from college,” I thought, oh come ON. Because I too have a forest green cover from a different inherited Joyce text:  Dubliners. The price listed is $1.45. On the first page, in the right hand corner, my father wrote L. Friedman. Underneath it I matched it with R. Friedman. This page also lists other books by James Joyce and next to each of those my father has read (or intends to read? I’ve never asked him to clarify) is a little red check mark. There’s one beside A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses but there’s a definitive, upper case NO next to Finnegans Wake. Same for me. Yes please to everything Joycean except the (mind-expanding or mind-numbing depending on your perspective) Finnegans Wake to which I too say NO thank you.

I  realized while reading  Sullivan’s essay, rife with literary references, that I was first inclined to travel because of books. I went to Ireland at twenty – my first solo trip – because Joyce seemed to be begging me to. I wanted to know his characters, which at the time I didn’t realize were not the same as actual Irish people. One of many much-needed life lessons learned abroad.

It’s easy to characterize reading as a sedentary pursuit. Of course the physical act often is.  But the activation of our imaginations is anything but. For many of us, reading is the way we get to know the world – our first experiences with faraway places and people. It gets us thinking about all that is out there waiting to be explored. Reading is not a substitute for experiencing life; it, ideally, pushes us towards activity and gives us an interesting context when we do find ourselves stumbling down a cobblestone street in Galway at 3 a.m. past Nora Barnacle’s house. I made my friends stop there, all of us blazing drunk, and proceeded to regale them with an incoherent diatribe on Gretta Conroy and Nora Barnacle and then, when they looked like they were losing interest, I brought up Joyce’s salacious love letters to his Galway girl.

If I hadn’t been a reader, I’m not certain I would have been a traveler. And I certainly wouldn’t see places the way I do now, with all their literary layers, which is to say all the history and mystery of those who have traveled there before me.

Against New Year’s Resolutions

January 13th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

A belated happy new year!  I hope this post finds you happy and healthy and detoxed from all the holiday cookies and booze.

Tis now the season of making and breaking new year’s resolutions – a practice I myself once wholeheartedly embraced. No longer, friends. No longer.

Here’s why. It is cold in January. In New York, it’s really, really freakin’ cold. I do not feel starting an aggressive exercise regime, for instance, in this weather. I feel like eating stews and watching movies. I want to hibernate, put on a few extra pounds no one needs to know about because it’s not bathing suit season. I feel entitled to this particular perk for living in this part of the country. Let those Californians stress themselves out all year round….

I re-evaluate and make resolutions in the spring. That’s the time of year when I feel ready for all that renewal and self-improvement. The trees and flowers are in bloom and, tra la la, so am I.

Happy Friday:)

Happy Holidays

December 24th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

Happy Holidays from me and the folks over at Figment.  I hope wherever you are is warm and cozy and full of people who drive you crazy (i.e. family and friends you love).  See you in 2012!

New Pieces

December 12th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

I’ve got a personal essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week. It’s about grappling with the realities of students’ lives outside the classroom within the vacuum of one.

I’ve also got a short article in New York magazine. I checked out how poets make their livings, what kind of competition there is in MFA programs, and just how much the Nobel Prize means for 2011 winner Tomas Tranströmer. Check it out!

Happy chilly Monday.

  • Twitter

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 44 other followers

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 44 other followers