Transform Your Travels Into Meaningful Memoir
(Published in The Summerset Review) I watched the Chelsea girls stalk down Kings Road. The street was hard and gritty under my feet, but the cement became gray velvet under their high-heeled shoes. I saw their packages from Harrods on Old Brompton Road. I imagined their walk down Sloane Street, chitchat in between the swish […]
I spent two weeks in Chiang Mai, Thailand visiting my sister and her family. My mother and aunt came too, and it was their first time in Thailand. As you can imagine, there was a lot going on. But were there any stories with a clear and compelling beginning, middle and end? Or was it […]
Here’s a list of the best travel memoirs. They all happen to be written by women. 1. The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam Dana Sachs I remember picking up The House on Dream Street at a bookstore in Washington DC when I was 24, in my first year of graduate […]
(Published in Redivider Journal) The male and female sides of Abu Dhabi University were mirror images: both pristine and starkly white, with South Asian security men guarding the connecting passageways. The male lobby was typically quiet, often witness to solemn greetings of salaamu alaykum, or the secrets of young men rushing to the computer lab […]
(Chapter One of my travel memoir, Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights, published by Pan Macmillan in 2012.) That first night in Abu Dhabi, I dreamed of a woman wearing a dazzling black headscarf hurrying through a maze of clay-coloured alleyways. She disappeared among the shadows cast by the domes of a nearby mosque and then […]
(published in Verity La) Miss, WALLAH, it’s true. They are everywhere. Every time you hear a noise in your house, or your TV stops working, or your computer beeps…’ Hana paused dramatically. ‘It’s a jinn.’ She searched my face for a sufficiently spooked reaction, and while I did my best to play along, I was […]
(published in Glassworks Literary Magazine) We meet in Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, Crème de la Crème; we meet in offices nested within gleaming towers, on the café-lined terraces of the Dubai International Financial Centre, in private clubs, empty food courts, inside palatial homes seated on regal, high-backed couches with crystal chandeliers above us and Filipina maids […]
(Published in Brevity) I lean over Todd’s desk. His head is down, eyes concentrating on the tangle of words he’s produced. I read silently along with him, parsing out scribble and scratches. As my bitten fingernail zigzags over his sentences, I realize that even my fingers don’t match my image of a fourth grade teacher, […]