Chasing Frisbees in the Sky

Rest in Peace, Unti

She was a great dog -- happiest when chasing frisbees, swimming, or just lying around with us. We will miss her terribly.

Wandering Educators Brings Me Home

Do you ever have the experience when you are traveling of turning a corner in a city you’ve never been in before and having the feeling you’ve been there before? There’s something almost comforting in the layout of the buildings or the smell of a nearby bakeshop that seems somehow almost like home. Recently, in my various wandering around the travel-related corners of the web, I came across the name of a website that intrigued me. With the same curiosity that gets me peering down alleyways in strange cities, I clicked on the link and it brought me here: Wandering Educators.

From the moment the page booted up, I knew there was something strangely familiar about the place. This website is a compendium of compelling stories, important travel tips, job postings, sabbatical homes, and travel deals. The layout is simple and straightforward, the blog post titles unpretentious, and the whole vibe positive and encouraging. It simultaneously welcomes me home and sends me out the door for new experiences.

Founded in 2007, the website is the brainchild of husband and wife team, Jessie Voigts and Ed Forteau. In an email interview, Voigts told me that they wanted to create a project that they could work on together. With Voigts’ background in education and travel, Wandering Educators was a natural choice. However, they had no idea how quickly the idea would catch on. Since the founding, they have grown tremendously and now see over a thousand visitors a day. After tapping Joel Carillet to be chief editor, they have added over forty editors in charge of writing and recruiting new content in areas as diverse as Italy and teaching in South Korea. Although these are volunteer positions now, as the site grows, Voigts anticipates a revenue sharing agreement with her editors. Although she claims to want to slow down, Ms. Voigts seems indefatigable, posting post after post on other travel sites and blogs, travel books, and tips for traveling with children.

Of the many stories posted by Wandering Educators, there are stories on heritage trips, hidden gems of Ireland, reviews of travel books and websites, and breaking travel news. I also appreciate the “artist of the month” and “photographer of the month” features, as they introduce me to visions of worlds I might not otherwise see.

For me, one of the most tempting places on Wandering Educators is the listing of sabbatical homes in places like New Zealand, Egypt, Turkey & Germany. Actually living in a country is such a completely different experience than just traveling through it. My wife and I experienced that while living and working in Austria and have been longing to move back ever since we left. So, if anyone knows of a job in the Salzburg area, please let me know.

In the meantime, I like what I see at Wandering Educators and may just make myself at home here.

Vote Like a Transcendentalist

Vote Like a Transcendentalist


Like many Americans, I have been thinking a lot about this election and my place in the historic nature of it. As a modern day Transcendentalist, I turned to the likes of Thoreau and Emerson for their thoughts. Thoreau, who famously marched to the beat of his own drummer, quoted the motto, “the government is best which governs least” in his essay, “On Civil Disobediance,” calling government “a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves.” This is the man who famously spent the night in jail for failure to pay a local tax because he did not want to support the American government’s war with Mexico.

However, contrary to popular belief, Thoreau did not call for the abolishment of government:

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

In following this call, I am making known what kind of government will command my respect: one that will weigh many options before deciding what might be best for the majority of the world’s citizens, not just Americans; one that recognizes that we are merely temporary inhabitants of this earth and not owners of it; and one that will seek to erase the divides and injustices that separate us from each other and not seek to institutionalize them. That, for me, is best represented by the candidacy of Barack Obama, and I urge all of you to get out and vote.

The Voices of Moore Hall

BLOGAPALOOZA STORY!

This story is part of Angela Nickerson's Blogapalooza event over at her blog, Just Go!

After reading this little tale, click on over there and read some of the stories there and sign in to win prizes, including my own A Journey into the Transcendentalists' New England and A Journey into Ireland's Literary Revival. In fact, this little story comes from my research for that book.

The Voices of Moore Hall

It was still a bit chilly the morning I pulled into the small parking area along the northern shore of Lough Carra, a large lake near the center of County Mayo in Ireland. I was there early that morning to catch the morning light on what had been the novelist George Moore's home until it burned down in 1923. George Moore was a colleague and friend of the poet William Butler Yeats and occasionally hosted the poet at this house. I had driven in to the area the night before from Galway and would continue on to Sligo in the afternoon.

Day was just dawning steel grey as I headed up the path toward the house. About halfway up the path, I looked back and could see my footprints in the wet grass leading up from the dark grey water of Lough Carra on the other side of my car. I continued on.

When I got to the house, I set up my tripod and began taking the photos I needed for my book. It was very quiet in the early morning and, as the sun rose, it did little against the thick wool blanket of clouds overhead. I continued to shoot the house and marveled at how a house this massive and historically important could just be left in the middle of the woods. There was a sign to the right of what had been the front entrance stating that the inside was off limits, and iron bars on the first floor doorways and windows, but other than that, there was nothing...and nobody around. Standing on the porch, under that granite portico, I also noticed that if I climbed over to the first story window from the porch, I could actually climb up through the window above the iron bars and drop into the interior of the house to explore.

Of course my curiosity got the better of me, and I climbed inside the house. It was tremendous to stand on the inside of the crumbling building and try to imagine what it was like, imagine the parties and grand gatherings of literary talent. Because the interior of the house was completely gutted, there was no way I could get up to the upper stories, but there was a stone staircase down to the basement, the dark basement.

Well, okay. I'm not going to say I wasn't scared at all, but I knew that was just plain silly. So, gripping my tripod like a baseball bat, I went down the stairs. And, I was right, there was nothing down there but what one visitor described as a "sinister labyrinth of arched corridors and dark rooms, their floors carpeted by a mulch of decaying leaves and squelching mud."

But, while I was down there, flashing my camera flash into corners not to take pictures, but to see what was there, I heard voices upstairs. Shit! I had left my camera bag and car keys just inside the front door in easy view. I immediately had visions of the local police hauling me off to jail for trespassing and having to call my publisher to spring me out. Or, perhaps worse, someone stealing my stuff and rental car. The voices were actually inside the house, so whoever it was either had the keys to the lock on the iron gate or had climbed through the window like I had.

I crept back up the stairs, again with my tripod in hand and peaked around the corner. Hmm. Nobody. The voices had gone. My stuff was there, untouched. Maybe the voices just sounded like they were in the house. I slipped back out the window and dropped back down to the grass below. I looked around the sides of the house -- still nobody. The group must have just come up to the front door, looked in the gate and then headed back down the path, disappearing before I got back upstairs. Whew, nothing to worry about.

I chuckled to myself and shouldered my camera bag to head back to my car. I guess I startle easily. Then, I noticed that my footprints in the wet grass were still the only ones leading up to Moore Hall. Nobody else had come this way.

The Story is in the Details

One of the temptations I fight against when I photograph literary sites is to try to get everything into one shot. So I will stand across the street and try to get the house and surrounding trees, like this photograph of The Wayside in Concord, Massachusetts.

Both the Alcott family (think Louisa May Alcott and her eccentric educational reformer father, Bronson) and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in the house. The leaves were at peak and it is an okay picture – but it is just a house. It doesn’t tell the story. The top floor addition was put on by Nathaniel Hawthorne – he called it his “Sky Tower.” He built it as a quiet writing retreat and put in a writing desk where he could pen his stories while standing. So, this picture is better for telling that story:





However, the best part of this trip was that I had contacted the house beforehand and spoke with the ranger in charge, Bob Derry, who agreed to not only give me a personalized tour, but allowed me to take photographs on the inside. So, I was able to get the picture I ended up including in the book:

Although this is not my favorite photograph, I’m happy with the sense of writer and place it gives. I think it tells the story of writer and place in a way that the first one does not. It gives a sense of intimacy.

Follow Me!

Hey - Follow Me!

Okay, I'm hoping it will be much easier to get people to follow my blog than to get this group moving in any one direction. I've added the "follow me" widget to my blog (look right) so you can sign up and check out new content when I post it. And with exciting new posts on photography, literary destination, green building, book marketing and the values of the two-two lineup for second-grade soccer, you will want to stay informed every step of the way.

It's a Party! A Blogapalooza Even!

My friend and fellow author, Angela Nickerson is hosting a blogapalooza party on October 29 at her blog:

http://aknickerson.blogspot.com/2008/10/blogapalooza-october-29.html

I will be slipping a few copies of my books into her goody bag for the party and contributing a strange trip of my own to the tale-telling. Put it on the calendar and stop on by.

Best Way to Plan a Best Weekend

Make the most out of the clear, crisp fall weekends with a trip to Boston. Grab a copy of Walking Boston and get to Beantown for a true taste of fall. The trees at the Arnold Arboretum are near peak, the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway is getting ready to celebrate its opening, and the waters of the Charles River will soon be churning with thousands of oars of crew teams from around the world.

If you go, take a look at this website, Jim Flynn’s Best Weekends. It’s a compendium of great tips and insider information for prime places to get away for the weekend all along the Eastern Seaboard. If you just want to hand the planning off to someone else, Best Weekends will find and book the perfect hotel, make reservations at the right restaurant, and snag those theater tickets you’ve been wanting. So, with perfect walking weather and the fall leaves providing the show, get online to Best Weekends, and then get out on the streets.

How to Photograph Literary Landmarks - The Old Manse

Photographing The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts

As I began working on A Journey into the Transcendentalists’ New England, I read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s book, Nature. He wrote it while living at the Old Manse, and the book serves as one of the foundations of Transcendentalism. Here is a key passage from the beginning of Nature:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- a mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
For me, this became a central tenet to my photography. Try to become Emerson’s “transparent eye-ball” and see “all.” This was particularly difficult on Boston’s Common during rush hour, but not so much at the Old Manse.

In Nature, Emerson writes of the importance of escaping not just from the society but also from one’s “chamber.” To that end, I wanted to capture a sense of the chamber in which Emerson wrote. Unfortunately, at the Manse (as at many literary landmarks), you need special permission requiring an application and a fee to shoot photographs for publication from the inside, so I set up this shot of the outside.

At the Old manse in Concord, the noises of the outside world fade away to be replaced with the sounds of place: the rustling of leaves, voices drifting across the yard, the occasional splash from the river, and, if you listen very carefully, echoes from the past. Of all the historical sites I’ve visited and photographed, the Old Manse is one where the past always feels close, so it was not at all surprising to find this colonial soldier guarding the bridge (actually, just a costumed volunteer).

How to Photograph Literary Landmarks

Photographing Literary Landmarks

One of my favorite parts of the three books I have done in the past four years is doing the photography. I have had the great fortune to photograph the Alcott’s Fruitlands farmhouse at sunrise on a cold January morning, William Butler Yeats’ Galway tower in the sunshine, Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, and Earnest Hemingway’s Cuban house. Each of these places presents a new challenge and offers new insights into the connections between literature and place. In the following series, I will explore some of the strategies I’ve used to create the photographs that accompany my books. I welcome your additional comments and suggestions.

Read Into It
All too many visitors have very little understanding of what was written at the literary landmark they’re at. Not to sound too much like a school teacher, but a little knowledge here can go a long way. While you may not be a scholar in the poetry of William Butler Yeats, you will want to know enough to realize that much of Yeats’ poetry is about the magic and mysticism found in nature. For example, while looking for the beach Yeats wrote about in “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,” these two swans who magically appeared as the sun broke out for the first time that day served quite well as symbols of what Yeats accomplished in verse.

Along the same lines, I had studied Yeats’ poem, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” numerous times and when my tour of Coole Park in Galway lead down to the water, I was thrilled to catch this view of the swans:

They only appear seasonally at the lakeside, so it was fortunate for me. But you don’t have to rely on luck. At the Old Manse in Concord, I knew I wanted to capture the paths that led Emerson from his study out into the woods that inspired his book, Nature and so walked around until I found this shot:

I will discuss photographing The Old Manse in the next installment of Photographing Literary Landmarks.