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1 Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine | Issue Eleven Because Global Storytelling Can Cause Hearts And Brains To Grow Wiser We couldn’t be more proud to report that, in our first year, we have had visitors from all of the following countries: Afghanistan, Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burundi, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, France, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Guernsey, Haiti, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Isle of Man, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Libya, Luxembourg, Macedonia, the Former Yugoslav Republic, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Morocco, Mozambique, Nepal, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Réunion, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Syrian Arab Republic, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United Republic of Tanzania, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. To submit, please visit us at www.outsideinmagazine.com. 2 Editor’s Note Take Issue With Issue Eleven (Really, you can now download our collection and take it all around!) I have been going through a phase lately that involves a lot of sitting on my couch looking at old photos of myself on foreign trains, watching films I made of my fellow Greyhound bus passengers, and wondering how someone so outgoing just a year ago could suddenly be satisfied with the weekly social interaction that comes from visiting Burger 101 for Bacon Wednesday. The answer, I think, is that life comes in phases, and that we seek substitutions when the situations we find ourselves in alter their offerings. Sometimes, we have the energy and opportunity to chat up the guy, sitting greasily beside us on a cross-country Greyhound, who just got out of prison and now works in a circus. Sometimes, we’re good with a smile from the burger guy. Each kind of being can serve us differently, but for now, I’d like to focus on some of the benefits of unabashed openness. My current substitute for social curiosity, I suppose, is that the editors of Outside In and I ask for stories in a formal way; this month, we have received a remarkable collection of global stories from Colombia, Germany, Japan, China, New Guinea, Greece, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Laos, India, Argentina, and from multiple locations within the United States. Having taken in the thirty-two different experiences shared within the pages of Issue Eleven, I am enriched. From looking at each story alone, and from my own understanding of the narrative of the collection as a whole, I am able to unravel just a bit more in my attempt to get this whole humanity thing sorted. It is my sincere hope that the stories we share here can offer you an insight or two (or thirty- two) into the ways in which we all connect, but more than that, I hope it will inspire you to act on the inner nudge it might take to ask someone you come upon about him/herself in a more casual way, or to share a bit of your own tale. Even if you’re not running into the sort of folks who are obviously intriguing, is there not something to be learned from each kind of character we come across? Add a new friend to your routine; no matter how ordinary your life might seem, wouldn’t it be nice to understand a bit more about the girl who makes your daily latte, the bus driver who delivers you on your daily routes, or the guy who brings you Bacon Wednesdays? Get out there, tigers. Know people. With Gratitude, Brandi Dawn Henderson Editor-in-Chief 3 Issue Eleven | Contents Nonfiction Autumn's Daisy Bell | Corinna Cook How to Get Back to the John Muir Trail | Chris Tarry Back to the Stone Age | C.B. Heinemann Families on the Fringe: Complexities of the Ie | Jen Cullerton Johnson Growing Up Into You | Gabriel Sistare In Bogota | Jay Duret Kindness And Adventure In New Mexico | Danielle Thompson My English Journey | Krishnamoorthy Aithal Chinese Holiday: Part One | Colleen MacDonald Not Another Literary Reference to Key West | Jake Kaida The Orchid Garden and the Paradise Birds | Carla Charleston The Little Corners of the World | Mark Rigney Fiction A Room That Has Lizzy In It | Michele Herman The Granada-Bound Train | Patty Somlo From NYC to HKG | Sophie Monatte Roads | Simon Speakman Cordall Poetry Y | Changming Yuan What We Already Are | Shenan Prestwich Death Valley | Arah McManamna Cemetery of the Caimans | Paul Brooke My India | Margaux Delotte-Bennett Tunica, MS | Matt Jones Vacation Pictures from a Friend | Nels Hanson Postcards from Athens | Thomas Zimmerman Microjourneys On The Way To Luang Nam Tha | Megan O'Leary Venture | Judi Zienchuk She Remembers | Shelby Settles Harper Dreamtime | Denise Schiavone Three Guanacos | Nathan Cornelius Good Friday | Ope Olum’degun Photostories The Mundane Fantastic | Diallo Jones-Brown Leaving Home | Chris Gebrosky 4 Nonfiction Editor Brandi Dawn Henderson 5 Autumn’s Daisy Bell Corinna Cook Autumn where I live in Alaska comes early and summer where my grandfather is dying in the midwest stays late. The dark air of the morning is cold on my neck when I walk away from my dog, my work, and the hills’ turning colors. I leave these in favor of an airplane idling on a paved corner of the valley below. In the minutes before takeoff the land grows streaked with stretched shadows of spruce trees. It is that first light of morning, light that shoots from the horizon along the flat earth like a stone skipping on water. Numbing my forehead against the window of row nineteen, I watch this light. The flatness of the valley leaves space for dawn’s momentum. Some drop hefty obligations midstride to board airplanes like this one but the truth is my dog doesn’t really need me. My work doesn’t either. Still, I am hopeful that the forest’s leaves will cease their turning when I leave, that without me the world will lose its purchase on autumn. I imagine my absence being dire to the birch trees, that their shift toward nakedness depends on my view of them from the porch. Leaves are always tumbling in feather pillow bursts these days. It is my practice to sit with the dog while leaves alight first here, then there. We watch the pockets of yellow flurries breathe like so many autumnal snowglobes, and I don’t know about the dog but I am always willing myself into that globe, carol book in hand. Do those soft blizzards continue to swirl in globes without carolers? You know, there are green pools sitting high in the mountains. There is snow all around them and they flame in the sun. Some of the highest mountains on earth bellow in the distance between the place where I live and the place where my grandfather is dying. But airplanes fly over them every day, at all hours. I am on one such plane, watching the North American continent pass below. There is a lot of snow, and later on, there isn’t any more. South. What my grandfather does and does not understand becomes tangible with the shifting landscape: midday over the continent the mountains smooth to plains. Roads multiply, compartmentalize. I remember when he stopped understanding that I do not play music any more, that I’ve nestled in with tidelands and forests rather than chamber ensembles. My grandfather is not senile. But he is urban, from the generation that invented diet soft drinks, Barbie, and the hydrogen bomb. There is a prim decency to this land’s patchwork and what does not make sense within it does not make sense to my grandfather. 6 When my grandfather stopped understanding that I listen but no longer play, I started lying about it. It’s okay. Now if I tell him something about a Brahms sonata — and he knows when I mean the one in F minor for clarinet — he probably understands something of the isolation and clarity and exhilaration I have in mind. Even if they come from the edge of a subarctic sea somewhere, I may well have learned them first from Brahms. I don’t know. So I’ll mention the sonata and my career-oriented midwestern urban grandpa will nod, eyes closed, accessing what he can of puffins on barnacled rocks at precisely the pace that they begin to elude me. The continent passes below and all day I watch the distance. It occurs to me that if I have traded music for space early on then he has done the opposite, and it also occurs to me that it is too facile a progression by which to chart this life, either mine or his. Eventually the front exit of the airplane opens under orange outdoor lights and runway blinkers. The seatbelt signal has yet to ding but already steamed air hits. It hits hard, like a wet throw rug. It is night on the shores of Lake Michigan, ninety degrees, and my grandfather doesn’t need me any more than autumn did. This essay is the latest installment in my asking my grandfather to die. I have been asking as much for ten years.