STORY BY HEATHER M. SURLS
Who are the characters who would give life to a story about your neighborhood? Here, Heather Surls answers that question about her own neighborhood by introducing us to those who inhabit its daily comings and goings in Amman, Jordan.
Last week we depended on words to recount a story of travel to Iona, Scotland. In today’s article the voyage is recounted solely through the images captured by a group of photographers who traveled together to the legendary island.
STORY BY DEVON ANNE FARMER
PHOTOS BY JC JOHNSON
This week our Culture Keeper passports take us to the famed but tiny Scottish island of Iona for a fleeting moment of reflection, as recounted by our newest Culture Keeper contributor.
In A.D. 563 after being banished from his native Ireland, St. Columba landed on Iona in the Southern Hebrides with the intention of bringing Celtic monasticism and Christianity to Scotland as penance. The island happened to be the first spot he reached from which he could no longer see the outline of his beloved Ireland in the distance.
BY SCOTT J. WILL
Pull up a chair and lean in as new Culture Keeper contributor Scott Will introduces us to family members you’ll wish you could know too.
I knew it would be hard. I had started preparing my heart and mind nearly one year before the day arrived. And when it did arrive, I knew it was time, and felt great peace with my decision, but I also longed for those last few moments to linger on and on. I stepped up to the six-passenger plane, like numerous times before when I had left for short stretches, but this time I felt the weight of the finality of it all.
STORY AND PHOTOS BY ROSHANDA CUMMINGS
Rather, it’s a city stretching forward, according to Culture Keeper contributor Roshanda Cummings.
Close your web browsers and your guidebooks. Erase your search history. Forget everything you’ve heard about Cuba and what you assume has happened to it as relations have begun to warm between America and this neighboring island nation.
PHOTOS AND STORY BY AMBER KIDNER
This installment from our resident contributor based in India was inspired by Lydia Davis’s very short stories. Photos were taken on an unpredictable Holga
By Amber Kidner
Just before Christmas I had an opportunity to visit a small school in Delhi. The school that my children attend had begun to work with this school in various ways. My assignment was to photograph the children both at work and at play, as they inhabited their school space on that particular morning.
By Kami L. Rice
We entered Bosnia by road as night fell. A full moon rose and threw a spotlight down on houses scattered like carcasses through the countryside.
So very many carcasses.
Empty inside, roofless, with charred stone walls marking a former existence.
Silent, somber, haunting, poetic testimony to tragedy.
What exactly had happened here?
Suddenly it all mattered.
By Amber Kinder
As I brushed off my Hindi notes recently, I was reminded of our water summer, and I thought of my continued foray into this language like swimming in a pool. With a renewed sense of purpose I’m wading in: testing, floating, choking, shivering, enjoying…
BY AMBER KIDNER
The setting was beautiful. Compared to Delhi’s flat, dusty, crowded surroundings, this was steep and quiet. The roads twisted and pulled and unbalanced us as we travelled up and around the mountains. They led us to falls, mountain towns, overlooks on the valley below, and the Himalayas beyond…
