There She Goes

For our fifth episode of S3 of There She Goes, we're proud to partner with VONA Traveling While BIPOC, the nation's first writing workshop for travelers of color. Adriana is a cultural anthropologist and women’s rights advocate. She is the award-winning author of Looking for Esperanza, My Mother’s Funeral, Keeping Quiet: Sixteen Essays on Silence, an essay collection coming out on September 24th, and Good Girls Don’t Sing La Bamba, coming out in 2025. Her essays, mostly on women’s issues, have been published in The Sun, Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and others. Adriana teaches creative nonfiction in the low-residency MFA program at Fairfield University and has offered Women Write, a writing class for Afghan university-level women looking to further their education. She writes from Colombia, where, oddly enough, she works as a dance and yoga instructor.

Lindsey is the author of The View From Below: Stories and The Water Will Hold You, a memoir. Her essays have appeared in Cimarron (SIMMERON) Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Best American Spiritual Writing, Real Simple, and Image. Lindsey’s award-winning short fiction has been published in Mississippi Review, Glimmer Train, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Lindsey lives in San Francisco and is a member of the Writers Grotto.

You all may know us as Podcasters, but we’re also moms – and we have deep love for the mothers who raised us – so we’re delighted to be starting off Season Three in honor of Mother’s Day, traveling with Emma Morell to Qatar, where she explores the joys and challenges of motherhood and living abroad. Emma Morell is an award-winning British travel writer, researcher, and blogger. Emma has spent more than a third of her life outside of the UK in 11 cities on 5 continents and has moved more than 30 times. She writes mainly about travel from an expat and a family angle and has been featured in publications in the UK, US, Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

For our final episode of Season 2, we're proud to partner with VONA Traveling While BIPOC, the nation's first writing workshop for travelers of color. In this episode, Christina Brobby journeys to the Faroe Islands, where she pushes through anxiety and finds herself moved to tears by an experience that awaits her. Christina lives in Canada’s Yukon on the Traditional Territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta'an Kwäch'än First Council. Her non-fiction pieces have won a number of awards including 2022 Writers Union of Canada’s Short Prose Competition. Her photography has appeared in The Sun magazine and Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Non-Fiction. Christina is a graduate of (VONA) Voices of our Nation Foundation.

This week we travel with our own co-host Lavinia Spalding to Busan, South Korea, where, after being told her whole life she can’t sing, she finally finds her voice. Lavinia is an award-winning author and editor who has published ten books. She’s the author of Writing Away, six-time series editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and co-author of With a Measure of Grace, This Immeasurable Place, and the 2022 Frommer’s EasyGuide to New Orleans. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times’ Modern Love column, AFAR, Tin House, Longreads, Yoga Journal, Sunset, AirBnB magazine, Off Assignment, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and many more national and international publications. Her work has won gold Lowell Thomas and SOLAS travel writing awards, has been widely anthologized. For more information

Today we travel with Samantha Schoech to Venice, Italy, where she basks in afternoon espressos, pitchers of Prosecco, flirtation with an Italian man named Fluvio, and the pure happiness of being unfettered. Samantha is a writer, traveler, and mom in San Francisco where she works as the books editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. Her essays, fiction, and journalism have appeared in many places including the New York Times, Seventeen, and Travel and Leisure. She was once briefly detained in Panama due to a hotel towel kerfuffle. www.samanthaschoech.com

This week, in honor of Father’s Day, we travel with Alison Singh Gee to Yosemite National park in California, where she revisits memories of her father and finally musters the strength to stand up to an old nemesis. Alison, a former Time Inc. journalist, wrote Where the Peacocks Sing, a Hong Kong-India memoir about her discovery that her Indian-journalist fiancé grew up in a 19th-century palace. She is a professor of creative nonfiction at Scripps College, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and Westways. She is working on a new memoir, about LA’s Chinatown.

Today we travel with Jenna Scatena to a jungle in Northern Thailand where she impetuously entrusts her life to a mysterious, notorious--and potentially dangerous--trekking guide. Jenna is an independent journalist based in Istanbul and San Francisco. She has been an editor for Sunset and San Francisco Magazines and has reported for American and British media from 21 countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, where her work explores the intersection of place and culture. She’s an international correspondent for Conde Nast Traveler and her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, BBC, San Francisco Chronicle, AFAR, O the Oprah magazine, Marie Claire, and Vogue, among others.

Jacqueline is the author of the novels, Passing Love and Searching for Tina Turner . Her essays have been published in Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 and 2020, and the Huffington Post. She received her MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California Riverside. The Bay Area native lives in Oakland, and continues her travels to nurture her passion for photography and exotic foods.

Today we travel with Lisa Boice to Ecuador, where she searches for inspiration in the form of one courageous, elusive bird. When not working her corporate job as a communications manager, Lisa Boice travels the world with her husband in search of birds. Her work has appeared in The Statesider and she has received a handful of Solas Travel Writing Awards from Travelers Tales. Stories of her birding travels can be found at TheAccidentalBirder.com and she is currently working on a memoir.

Today we travel to Sicily with Ann Leary, as she and her husband Denis face their fears in search of The Godfather, drive the terrifying Autostrade, get lost on nearly vertical switchbacks, and hike up Mt Etna, where, she notes, “lava could erupt at any moment with zero warning.” Ann Leary is the author of the novels, THE CHILDREN, THE GOOD HOUSE, OUTTAKES FROM A MARRIAGE, and the memoir, AN INNOCENT, A BROAD. Her bestselling novel, THE GOOD HOUSE, has recently been adapted as a motion picture. The film starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline, will be released in 2020. Ann’s New York Times essay, “Rallying to Keep the Game Alive,” was adapted for the Amazon Modern Love TV Series and stars Tina Fey and John Slattery. She is currently working on a new novel and a collection of essays for Simon and Schuster. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages and she has written for numerous publications including Ploughshares, NPR, Real Simple and the New York Times. First appeared in the Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 11

Today, in honor of Father’s Day, we travel around the world with Naomi Melati Bishop as she recounts her father’s spectacular adventures -- and takes us on a mission to honor his final wishes. Naomi Melati Bishop was born in Indonesia to odd soul mates: a Javanese princess and a wild New Yorker dad. She moved to NYC when she was eleven, where she currently resides with her daughter and partner. Naomi earned her MFA at NYU’s Graduate Creative Writing Program and works as a writer, editor, and teacher. Naomi runs an editing service, TheEdit.nyc, and is currently at work on her first book, a memoir about her mysterious origins, new motherhood, her parents' love story, and her inheritance of worldwide adventures.