Summer stories

In the maroon recliner in our living room with the overhead fan whirling, I read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn And Maggie-Now every summer until we moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota. My reading grew to include contraband paperbacks I hid behind bookshelves and the now defunct Sassy magazine.  My first summer in Turkey I read everything by Jane Austen. I measured periods of time by the books I read and the beverages I drank while processing the melodic, confusing sounds of Turkish. 

This summer I have my own story to offer - The Mercy Troupers, set in the desert and trailer parks to the tune of evangelical roadies. I scratched out the first draft when I was 21 and sitting on a park bench next to Lake Mendota. Now ten years later it's the first story I've published.

Another summer tale, shot on our Canon Powershot SX10IS and edited in iMovie, is a casting video for House Hunters International. The video peeks into our home and neighborhood in Izmit. It's a love story. And a story about leaving home.

What story, book or otherwise, is captivating you right now?

Conversational crossroads

Mapping my hybrid life on a personal, passion level involves drawings, notations, and novel writing. The stuff I do daily. When it connects with others, like in conversation with the 10 cultural innovators I'll be talking to on Feb 28 as part of Dialogue2010 at expat+HAREM, it becomes multi-dimensional, an elixir of dynamic change and inspiration. In talking about abandoning the map to live more fully, dialogue becomes art.

Anastasia Ashman, expat+HAREM producer, identifies a crucial element of what happens when identity is fluid, when location, desire, and being in the present are invited to shape a meaningful life: "a wider orbit around the inner me" is allowed to emerge. That is what I hope will be explored in Dialogue2010: unearthing the things we need to let go of in order to move forward, blurring our boundaries, and developing our own idiosyncratic centers of balance.

As the first inception of Art is Dialogue, I invite you to join in the twitter chat #dialogue2010, or add a comment, and listen to the podcast when it's made live this spring.