Lynn Cecil - Outside of Ordinary: Womens Travel Stories

OUTSIDE of ORDINARY

WOMENS TRAVEL STORIES

edited by Lynn Cecil and Catherine Bancroft

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Outside of ordinary : womens travel stories / edited by
Catherine Bancroft and Lynn Cecil.
ISBN 1897187-00-9
1. Travelers writings, Canadian (English). 2. Women travelers
Canada. 3. Voyages and travels. 4. Travel in literature.
I. Cecil, Lynn A. (Lynn Anne), 1967- II. Bancroft, Catherine, 1972
PR1309.T73O95 2005 C818.5403 C2005-904393-8

Letter to Miguel Otera Silva, in Caracas, quoted in Lorna Croziers story
Chilean Winter, reprinted from Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems, Beacon
Press, Boston, 1996. Copyright 1996 Robert Ely.
Used with his permission.

Girl in a Taxi, Sway, Glacier, Wahike, and Salt to Soothe the Sting by Holly
Luhning from Sway, Thisdedown Press, 2003. Used by permission. The epigraph for
Wahike is from Diane Schoemperlens novel In the Language of Love.

Galileo
Words and Music by Emily Saliers
1992 EMI VIRGIN SONGS, INC. and GODHAP MUSIC
All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI VIRGIN SONGS, INC.
All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured Used by Permission

Collection copyright by Lynn Cecil and Catherine Bancroft
Individual stories and poems copyright by the authors named
First published in the USA in 2006

Edited by Doris Cowan
Cover design Anne Horst/ www.i2iart.com
Text design by Lancaster Reid Creative

Printed and bound in Canada

Second Story Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

Published by
SECOND STORY PRESS
20 Maud Street, Suite 401
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5V 2M5
www.secondstorypress.ca

The journey of compiling and editing this collection of womens stories has been a long and life-altering one. To all of the contributors who have written so openly of their travel experiences, I extend my deepest gratitude and thanks. It has been an honour and a delight to work with you.

Throughout this process my family and friends have been incredibly supportive, offering much encouragement. I would particularly like to thank my husband Ben for his profound kindness and love and his unconditional support, my children, whose hugs mean more than theyll ever know, and my parents, who have influenced me in their passion for travel and whose support for my love of writing and painting began when I was two years old, and has strengthened especially over the past two years. To many other wonderful friends and relatives, thank you for your years of support, encouragement, and your friendship. You are all so very dear to me.

Margie Wolfe, Laura McCurdy, Leah Sandals, and Barbara Kamienski at Second Story Press have been unwavering in their support, their friendship, and their strength. I am forever grateful to you, and to all of the women at Second Story, for your kindness and wonderful sense of humor. You have made the publishing process so very enjoyable!

Lynn Cecil
August 2005

I am enormously humbled by the risks that all of the women have taken in order to share their stories. I believe that these stories have the ability to affect women across the world.

I am profoundly indebted to the generous support of both of my parents, Joan and Mike Bancroft, and Bill Genereux, for making this dream a reality. Thank you to my mom and my grandmothers, Helen and Jean, for teaching me about the power of spirit.

Through my travel journeys to Zimbabwe and Nepal, I was deeply affected by the presence of community and ritual in both of these cultures. Simultaneously, I struggled with the labels of developed and underdeveloped countries; although it was clear to me that our Western cultures are more economically advanced, I began to see us as more spiritually impoverished. I searched for travel literature that spoke to the spiritual, transformative journeys that women experience to assist me on my quest. As a result, I perceived a gap in this genre.

It became my dream to create a womens travel anthology that would offer a space for women to express their intimate, transformative stories. It was also my hope that the contributors would be united in community birthed by the anthology.

Thank you to Lynn Cecil for all of your hard work and efforts.

Catherine Bancroft
August 2005

The adventure and thrill of traveling, of exploring unfamiliar landscapes, has for centuries lured many people away from the general comfort and security of their homes. From as early as the seventeenth century, womens travel writing, often recorded in the form of letters back home, focused on observations of other women, the environment, the people and culture, the customs observed, and traveling tips. Written in an expository style, womens travel stories and letters served as guides to different countries. By the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first, womens travel writing has expanded to include creative non-fiction memoirs and novels, but very few are collections of stories, and fewer still are ones in which women explore their reactions to how travel has changed their lives.

Inviting readers to imagine the excitement of travel, with its endless possibilities for change and self-renewal, and the occasion to reflect upon the past and anticipate the future, Outside of Ordinary provides a unique opportunity to experience thirty-two womens intimate responses to travel. In both the literal and metaphorical sense, travel has transformed their lives, expanding their vision of themselves, their communities, and other communities around the world. Opening with Kathie Sutherlands story of a new beginning, incited by being suspended above the earth in a plane, the collection contains stories that will transport readers around the world, through North, Central, and South America, Europe, Asia, the South Pacific, and Africa, as the contributors write of their elation, and sometimes trepidation, at leaving the known for the unknown, testing and stretching their mental and physical limits.