What It’s Like Living Here — From Patrick Findler in Goris, Armenia: an exploration of place, recounting my time in Goris at Numero Cinq.
In Old Goris there are wild-growing herbs such as a local minty- or marjoram-flavored thyme and nettles, which are gathered up at the base of the hills in spring, summer, and fall and brewed into an herbal tea or baked into small, flat loaves of doughy bread.
The Giant Garbage Pit, or The Largest Diamond Mine in the World – Then, a Robbery and a House on Fire: My Travels in North Siberia: It’s what it sounds like. Writing for Catapult
At the airport, he said, they understood foreigners. They would know what to do. But he wouldn’t stay there and see, he couldn’t help me any more than he had. I shrugged and agreed. I noticed I was speaking in a flat, slow voice. He began to explain himself again, speaking quickly from guilt, looking directly at me over his shoulder as he drove. He added that he could not take me to his home, he was too afraid: If the police learned I had been there, staying with no entry stamp or official permission to stay overnight, it would fall on him in unpredictable ways. He had an apology in his voice. Something like this, I thought, had happened to him before.
Patrick Findler, 1001 Interviews No. 10: Jessica Yen interviewed me for 1001 journal.
I was thinking about nostalgia today. Went to get a sausage at the Polish sausage cart and the woman was wearing a perfume that was very popular on the busses in Moscow in 2001. And I bent my head in to get the full smell as far as I could, just hungry to go back. But then I thought would I really go back and live like that again?
No.
Mo Daviau – Every Anxious Wave: an interview at Late Night Library.
She writes a very amusing anthropological, or expedition report, I guess, and then an email. Her voice comes across extremely strongly, and it’s like I’m almost in a different world from Karl’s world. Her voice is so vivid, and her storytelling is – while her language is very muted, in a way, it was just an interesting fact. Were those parts easier, harder, different to write?
