Well I left my happy home To see what I could find out I left my folk and friends With the aim to clear my mind out Cat Stevens’s song, “On the Road to Find Out” was pretty much my anthem during my Chasing Light journey. Hitting the highway and headed for the next town, I’d crank up the speakers and rock out, believing, as I had since I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman, that Cat (now Yusef) understood something fundamental about me, about my raw hunger to know all

It is Day Six of my eighteen-day residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. VCCA is in Amherst, Virginia, home of Sweet Briar College, and within easy driving distance of Lynchburg to one side and Charlottesville to another. I am staying put, though, happy to be sequestered here on this renovated dairy farm. We work in an old friendly concrete block barn with a cozy kitchen surrounded by small, well-appointed studios. An eighth of a mile down the lane is the resi

I want to take a moment and welcome new subscribers, many who've joined this “Chasing Light” caravan after reading my travel essay in The Daily Beast. Glad to have y’all aboard! The journey of seeking and finding light is, of course, not limited to the road, so even though I’ve stopped my wandering ways for the time being, my restless heart keeps moving toward new insights like a seedling plant toward sun. Also, a shout-out to Elizabeth Brockway, the artist who created this s

It is early on a Sunday morning. I’m sitting in the empty lobby bar at the Renaissance Marriott Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, the splashy sound of a large indoor fountain echoing in the nearby atrium. Sunday morning diners drift in; departing travelers thread their way past enormous potted trees, the wheels of their carry-ons whirring rhythmically. This past weekend Queens MFA grads and some current students gathered for a reunion as we brought work samples – our essays