Interview with Siffy and Tor Torkildson, editors of “The Walkabout Chronicles”
“The Walkabout Chronicles: Epic Journeys By Foot” is an illustrated collection of 35 essays about walking. The writers include scientists and archeologists, artists, explorers, and “ordinary people who do extraordinary things…”
Q&A with David Downie, author of “Paris: City of Night”
An interview with David Downie, author of “Paris: City of Night,” “Paris Paris: Journey into the City of Light,” “Paris to the Pyrenees” and more….
November in Essoyes
“Every year in our little village the names of each of the men whose names are carved on the memorial is read, followed by a “Mort pour la France!” shouted by a member of the sapeurs pompiers (firefighters). It takes a while to read all those names, which gives the people paying tribute to their sacrifice time to think about what it really means…”
Continue Reading November 16, 2016 at 1:03 pm Leave a comment
Autumn in Essoyes
…As always, the vendange brought new faces and a new bustling energy to the town for those 10 days. Rain or shine, cool, misty mornings, blazingly hot afternoons, students, gypsy families, and of course many townspeople pitched in to bring in the grapes…
Continue Reading October 23, 2016 at 6:54 pm Leave a comment
Q & A with Harriet Welty Rochefort, Author of “Joie de Vivre” and other books about the French
The author of “Joie de Vivre” and “French Toast: An American in Paris Celebrates the Maddening Mysteries of the French” talks about misconceptions on both sides of the Atlantic, what she loves about the French (and about the U.S.) and her new novel…
And then they were gone…
Les gens de voyage came here to pick grapes during the harvest…and then they were gone again…
Continue Reading September 27, 2016 at 1:44 pm Leave a comment
September in Essoyes…
It has not been an easy year for the vignerons in this area, whose year-round, painstaking, exacting work brings the world one of life’s greatest pleasures…champagne…
August in Essoyes
…some people leave to go to the South of France on vacation, and others come here to vacation, mostly from Paris, but also from Belgium and other places. You can tell the tourists from the townspeople (or the summer people) by the little maps they clutch in their hands as they walk the streets, following the trail of Renoir in Essoyes…
Bastille Day in Essoyes
Bastille Day did not end peacefully in France this year, but it did begin that way, at least in “my” little village of Essoyes…
Summertime in Essoyes
The fields of colza and wheat are continuing to ripen, and all along the edges of the fields, the streets of the town, pushing up through the stones in the cemetery, the wildflowers continue in their subtle, determined progression through the season…
Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road 