In Defense of National Airlines

ROADS & KINGDOMS - 23 APRIL 2014

Malaysian Airlines Flight 370: How can 239 people just disappear? I fantasize about the plane itself: What it looked like, the color of the seats, the food. Will I ever fly on Malaysian Airlines? Will anyone ever want to again?

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Expat lives: from Canberra to Phnom Penh

FINANCIAL TIMES - 5 JULY 2013

On occasion, Australian interior designer Bronwyn Blue likes to get up early and watch the sun rise over the Mekong river. On these mornings, she leaves her apartment in Phnom Penh before the streets become a sea of slow-moving scooters, cars and SUVs, and takes an early morning stroll, perhaps buying coffee or fruit on the way back, or stopping to watch old men and women practise tai chi under a tree.

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The writing life: From Beirut and Cambodia to New York, Florida, and parts unknown

THE MILLIONS - 17 AUGUST 2012

Because summer in Beirut was so brutally hot and because the grandparents missed their granddaughter and because the dream was still alive and I had signed up this winter for a low-residency creative writing MFA program in Tampa, which required me to travel from Lebanon to the Florida campus for 10 days in June, I began to sketch out an entire summer in America, anchored by that MFA residency and then two weeks at a writing conference four hours north of New York City.

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