creative work and blog
Le Grand Bal de l’Europe, the Grand Ball of Europe commonly known as “Gennetines,” is a folk dance festival held each summer at a farm outside of Moulins, France, about a 2 ½ hour train ride south of Paris. It features traditional dance forms, known as balfolk, from various regions of France and Europe, plus…
The Galápagos Islands of Ecuador were my first international travel experience at the impressionable age of 19. Feeling stuck and discontent in the Ivory Tower, and with a burning itch to see what else was out there, I headed to the Galápagos as a volunteer ESL teacher with the program WorldTeach the summer after my…
(Essay originally published in Schwa Fire in Dec. 2014. Photos by Max Cooper.) When I met Wally just after moving to Asheville in early 2012, he was still deeply engaged in media reform advocacy, his life’s work. The nonprofit he ran was a unique blend of Internet service provider and progressive local news source for…
The last time I slept alone, overnight, in the woods, was in September 2001, on an Outward Bound course that happened to also be in the Asheville area, during the week of the September 11th attacks. With my daughter at camp, I just did it again, and it felt significant to realize that that first…
My first book, The Sophisticated Savage, was published in 2009. It’s based on my experiences in Ecuador in 2001, when I taught English for a summer on the Galápagos Islands, and 2005. From the back cover: An anthropological memoir with a romantic twist. A Harvard student and an ex-cannibal may seem like an unlikely pair,…
Here are some of the projects I’ve created over the years. In addition, a complete list of my articles in Asheville’s Mountain Xpress can be found here. Most of my radio pieces can be found on my PRX page. Please also feel free to check out and subscribe to my YouTube Channel, which has a…