Essays and Creative Nonfiction
- "Curious Blue: Captured by Woad" Hand/Eye Magazine (September 19, 2012)
- "Dumpling Impulse: Discovering Mandut Guk in Seoul" BootsnAll (August 2012)
- "Shine Boy" Drash (June 2012)
- "Paris Chiasma" Flashquake Spring 2012 issue. (Flashquake has, unfortunately, ceased publication. The pages with my essay are provided below.)
- Video of reading excerpt from "The Golden Onsen: Bathing in
Japan"
Second Place Winner Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, Tara L.
Masih Intercultural Essay
Prize (2011) March 25, 2012, San Francisco
Main Library.
- Al Jadid
(December 2011) and Rosebud - Giornalismo Online - "Tales From Chinese Calligraphy" Marco Polo Arts Magazine (September 2011)
- "The Smell of Silk" Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture (July 2011; Volume 9, Number 2, pp. 194-199)
- "The Color of Cloth" Anthologized in Burning Bright: Passager Celebrates 21 Years
- "Of Body, Of Land" Drash (June 2011)
- "My Father's Résumé"Carpe Articulum Literary Review (Summer 2010-posted in Free Sample Issue on website homepage)
- "Feeling Welcome in Japan"Transitions Abroad (Posted May 2010)
- "Saffron and Nukes"
Transitions Abroad
Runner-up in the 2009 Transitions Abroad Narrative Travel Writing Contest - "The Color of Cloth" Passager (Winter 2009).
- "Lines and Angles" The Best Women's Travel Writing 2009: True Stories from Around the World (2009)
- "A Familiar Sensation in a Grown-up Iran" Travel Essay, The Seattle Times (August 10, 2008)
- "The Warp of Memory" Memoir (and) (Summer
2008)
(Excerpt posted on web)
Grand Prize Winner in the Spring 2008 Memoir (and) Contest - "Flamenco
Form" The Best Travel Writing 2008 (March 2008)
Grand Prize Silver and Women's Travel Gold winner in the Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing 2007 - "Putting a Price on our Natural World" Nature Watch, Official Magazine of The Nature Society (Singapore) (October-December 1993).
- "Newcomb Pottery" co-authored with Gail Lynch, Louisiana Life (March/April 1987)
- "Winding River Holds City's Fate" AAPG Explorer (March 1985).
This piece received the 1986 Organizational Writing Award from the New Orleans Press Club.
"You seek alchemy. You crave the mysteries of an
ancient blue. So you sign up for initiation, unaware that
your seduction by woad has already begun."
"Looking
into the front window from the alley, I had seen a large
tray of dumplings. They were like a fleet of perfectly
spaced fat boats sailing across the silver surface of a
pond.."
"An Hour in Hama"
"Hama is
the city where I stopped on a journey from Palmyra to
Aleppo, where I photographed the ancient wooden water wheels
that jigsaw the curving riverbed of the Orontes..."
"I was
illiterate. To my eyes the lines and dots of Chinese writing
were little more than mystic squiggles. Yet I was living in
Singapore where the characters flock upon signs, windows,
shops, and scrolls, even grocery receipts. Then I met an
artist, a Chinese calligrapher, whose lessons led me through
the mysteries of this ancient art."
"I am a
writer, not a weaver, but I am drawn to the language of
color, culture, and texture of handwoven textiles conveyed
through the alchemy of technique."
"Today, we racers own the
express lanes, closed to cars, open only to us. Cycles of
pedals, pedals of circles, spin of spokes across the water."
"STOL: Short Take Off and
Landing, small, light planes vital to reach the landing
strips on the tops of mountains and plateaus and edges of
hillsides that called to the Americans in Laos in their
quest to defeat the Communists."
"I always feel a bit
embarrassed at having the unearned good fortune of being a
native speaker of the language that has become the lingua
franca of world travelers. In Japan I was grateful for the
many kind strangers who were willing to use their English
to help me."
"It was the smells and
tastes of food that struck the gongs of
memory: the fragrant steam off a platter of rice; the chewy smokiness of flatbread fresh from the oven; the salty-sour
bite of a pickled green plum that had been forbidden to me as a child but that I had eaten anyway."
"Orange is yellow with
a
touch of red. When we lived in Laos my mother sewed me a dress the
color
of monks' robes. What is it about this dress, a Hawaiian-style
mu'uu'mu in vogue at the time, that moves me to transfer
image to
page just as my mother transferred pattern to cloth?"
"Dubey hit horn, gas, brake, and we made a right turn from three
lanes
in, shot up the entrance ramp to a highway. He twisted the rearview mirror to find my eyes. 'Madame, I must tell you
something.'"
"From a hand-drawn map and faded photographs, I tried to find the two-story
house
in
Tehran where we had lived. But our street is now built over, and the neighborhood is filled with high-rises. The city has grown up."
"Smells are Proustian pockets of memory: frangipani, mango, dried
fish, dried frog legs. There is the smell of rain (the
first after the dry season), the smell of my pony's neck, the smell of burnt coffee beans in the streets of Paksé, the
town where we
lived."
"With a stomp of heels she announces her beginning and flies into
a swirl
of skirt and snapping fingers. She lights a staccato of zapateado that sounds like a woodpecker gone mad in the forest."
Books
- Behind the Brushstrokes: Tales from Chinese Calligraphy, co-authored with Khoo Seow Hwa, Hong Kong: ASIA 2000, 1999.
Stories
- "The Only Piano in Paksé" Bakka Magazine (September 2006)
Video Production
- "Octopus Ballet" (Nov. 2008). Three-minute video screened in the Smithsonian Sant Ocean Hall, Ocean Today Kiosks, Summer 2009.
- "What is the Journey..." (Oct. 2009). Promotional piece for Global Partnerships Business of Hope Luncheon.
Scientific and Technical
- "A Fiber-Optic Telescope to the Deep Sea." The Earth Scientist (Spring 2010 issue) (downloadable PDF available National Earth Science Teachers Association.
- "The NEPTUNE Project." co-authored with Mark Stoermer, Current: The Journal of Marine Education, vol. 18, no. 4 (2003).
- "Science Planning for the NEPTUNE Regional Cabled Observatory in the Northeast Pacific Ocean." 13 co-authors, Report of the NEPTUNE Pacific Northwest Workshop (April 2003).
Awards and Fellowships
- Selected as Alternate by Shawn Wong, Curator 2012 Jack Straw Writers Program (December 2011)
- Second Place Winner, Soul-Making Literary Competition, Tara L. Masih Intercultural Essay Prize (2011)
- Third Place Winner, Jane Stories Press Foundation, Jane Stories Nonfiction Contest (2011)
- Honorable Mention, January 2011 New Millennium Writings Nonfiction Competition (2011)
- Honorable Mention, January 2009 New Millennium Writings Nonfiction Competition (2009)
- Runner Up Transitions Abroad Narrative Travel Writing Contest (2009)
- Grand Prize Winner in the Spring 2008 Memoir (and) Contest (2008)
- Grand Prize Silver and Women's Travel Gold winner in the Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing (2007)
- Whiteley Center Scholar, two-week residency at the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center, Friday Harbor, Washington (March 2007)
- Organizational Writing Award from the New Orleans Press Club (1986)
- Persian Language Class, University of Washington (July 2, 2009)
- "Living (1958) and Visiting (2008) Iran," Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church, co-presented with Jean Sundborg (October 26, 2008)
- "Iran Rediscovered," Wide World Books and Maps, Seattle (September 30, 2008)
- Iranian Festival, Seattle Center (June 28, 2008)
- Persian Culture Class, University of Washington (June 26, 2008)
- "Staffer returns to a beloved country from her past: Iran." University Week (May 29, 2008) Photo gallery from link at end of story.
- "Shine Boy,"Drash 2012 author readings in Seattle (Ravenna Third Place Books, June 3; Temple Beth Am, July 28; Queen Anne Books, August 22)
- "The Color of Cloth" reader and curator of Voices Over 50, University Bookstore, Seattle (April 25, 2012)
- Excerpts from "Hama" and "Of Body, Of Land," Uptown Stroll, Counterbalance Park, Seattle (August 27, 2011)
- "Of Body, Of Land," excerpt, Drash 2011 author readings in Seattle (Temple Beth Am, July 30; Queen Anne Books, August 17; Ravenna Third Place Books, June 5)
- "The Color of Cloth," anthologized in Burning Bright: Passager Celebrates 21 Years. Reading and book launch, University of Baltimore (June 18, 2011)
- "Of Body, Of Land," essay, Drash author reading, Ravenna Third Place Books, Seattle (June 5, 2011)
- "Craving Paris," essay, Seattle's Uptown Stroll (2010)
- "Eating the Moon," story, University of Washington Women's Center (2003)
- "Pilgrim-Feet," prose poem, University of Washington Women's Center (2000)
- "Feeling at Home," "The New Birder," "Nightwalk," "Dolphins at Night," SBC Radio 1, Singapore (1993)
Talks and Slideshows
Readings