Travel – Frank Bures

In Search of a Storied Past

mia_Rotarian_FamilyHistoryXX_0 New column from The Rotarian:

My dad and I were on our way south, moving through rolling farmland. The sun was bright and the fields were green. It felt as though we were in a Grant Wood painting, caught between the smallness of our lives and the grandness of the sky. High above, stark white clouds cast shadows on the highway.

“Are we in Iowa yet?” I asked.

“We’ve been in Iowa for quite a while,” he responded.

“Do you want me to look at the map?”

“If you want to.”

We were also headed back in time, on a rescue mission of sorts. With me I had an audio recorder and a bunch of questions. For several years, I had been researching and writing about stories – about the way we use them to stitch ourselves together with the world around us. But I didn’t have a full picture of my own family’s story. I was sure I could find more pieces that would help me trace the links in the chain leading from my life into the past.

I had come across some fascinating studies on family stories and the power they have over us. In recent years, researchers have noted that children in families that eat dinner together often have better emotional health and are happier and more resilient than their peers. This has less to do with eating together than it does with the fact that family dinners provide space for stories to emerge. And knowing your family stories can make a real difference in your life.

Read the rest here.

Saving the Night Sky

MilkyWayStromatolites_Zhang_1080 New Story in the Star Tribune:

A few years ago, in the fall, I went camping in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on a string of clear nights. When the sun set, there was no moon and the stars came alive in the sky, billions of them stretching from one horizon to the other. In the dark, I lay on a warm rock near the water for a long time, watching meteors flare and satellites circle the earth before turning in.

220px-The_End_of_Night_cover Later, I got up in the night, stepped out of my tent and looked north. The big dipper still hung there, only it had spun, like someone reached down and turned it with a giant hand. For a few seconds I stood there, struck by the palpable sense of being on a planet spinning through space.

A few days later, I was back in Minneapolis, where I would look at the night sky and think of all the stars I couldn’t see. Instead, there I saw a bluish haze with a few bright points. This is what’s known as the “skyglow” and it’s something that increases every year, blocking more of the cosmos from our view.

Read the rest here.

Photo via NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day.

The China Mystery Illness and the Power of Stories

From Undark Magazine: To Believe is to Feel: When a Mysterious Epidemic Isn’t So Mysterious

When U.S. diplomats in the Chinese city of Guangzhou recently started reporting strange, inexplicable symptoms of unknown origin — and which seemed to be spreading among State Department employees — I was reminded of a similar “mystery illness” that I spent some time researching a few hours south of Guangzhou, in a village called Fuhu.

One afternoon in May of 2004, a third-grade boy at a local school in Fuhu reported feeling that his genitals were shrinking. He panicked, ran home, and his parents fetched the local healer — an 80-year-old woman who had seen this sort of thing before: In 1963, she said, around the time of the Great Leap Forward, an “evil wind” had blown through the village and many people were struck by this illness known as “suo-yang.” She treated the boy by traditional means and he recovered quickly.

Two days later when the school principal learned of the incident, he gathered all 680 students in the school courtyard and, according to a report by Dr. Li Jie of the Guangzhou Psychiatric Hospital, “explained to the students in detail what had happened, and warned them to be cautious, and to take emergency measures if they experienced similar symptoms.”

Read the rest here.

Class: Write Around the World

28238834_1615693778478879_9025094513664493815_o This summer, I’ll be teaching a half-day class on travel writing at The Loft Literary Center: “Write Around the World: Your Journey from Travel Writing to Publication”

When: Saturday, 8/4/18, 9:00 – 1:00 pm

Class Description: “Even in today’s connected world, travel writing remains an indispensable genre. In this class, we’ll look at exactly what travel writing is, where it’s published, the differences between narrative and service-oriented travel writing, and how to know which branch is for you. We’ll look at the craft side, and talk about the business end as well, including how to pitch your story to the right market.”

Instructor: “Frank Bures is the author of The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes. His work has been included in the Best American Travel Writing and selected as “Notable” for the Best American Sports Writing and Best American Essays.”

Hope you can join us!

The Same River

SWM From Southwest Airlines Magazine: Uncharted Waters:

At 6 a.m., I was shin deep in the Mississippi River, strapping our bags into our canoe so they wouldn’t float away if we capsized. On shore, my wife, Bridgit, stood with our two girls, Libby and Josie, who were skipping rocks.

P1010993 Once the last bag was secure, we climbed in and found, to our relief, that there were still several inches between the top of the canoe and the water. We pushed out into the river, and were off on our journey southward.

It was an adventure we had planned ever since we’d moved back to Minnesota nearly a decade ago. I’d grown up in a small Minnesota town called Winona, 120 miles downstream from where we lived now in Minneapolis. It felt important to connect the two places, to 20170627_153041 know the river between them. We would row together, like the voyageurs. We would forget about the modern world and its troubles for five days and see our home in a new light. It was just a small piece of the river’s 2,350 miles, but it was a piece filled with meaning for me.

Read the rest here.

Geography of Madness: Spanish Edition

GOMesp The Geography of Madness is now available in Spanish:

Geografía de la locura: En busca del pene perdido y otros delirios colectivos (Ensayo General)

Una desternillante exploración de las extravagancias y los desvaríos colectivos: ¿Por qué ciertos individuos creen que unos vándalos roban sus penes o que tienen lagartos bajo la piel? ¿Cuál es el origen del vudú? ¿Existe el latah, ese curioso estado que provoca bailes frenéticos y movimientos espasmódicos? Frank Bures ha viajado por todo el mundo para rastrear los síndromes más estrambóticos ligados a la cultura y contar luego deliciosas historias sobre esas extrañezas. Se confirma una vez más que el hombre es un animal muy raro.

Read the rest here.

Where to Eat Somali Food in Minneapolis

Qoraxlow_11RBG-e1517608934558 New story at Roads & Kingdoms, featuring beautiful photos from Priscilla Briggs.

A few months before I moved to Minneapolis, I stopped at a gas station while visiting the city looking for a place to eat. The cashier and two customers—all of whom were Somali—conferred for a minute, then pointed me up the street to a building that didn’t look much like a restaurant. The windows were dark and the façade was strange, but high on the roof was a sign that read: Qoraxlow Restaurant #1 African and American Cuisine.

I walked inside. The place was run down: a giant TV played CNN, there were no menus, and the credit-card machine was broken. But once the door closed, the sound of talking and laughing, and the smell of rice and goat meat, brought me straight back to East Africa. I’ve never tired of eating at Qoraxlow since.

That was nearly a decade ago. Somalis had started landing in Minneapolis in force a few years earlier. After the Somali civil war started in 1991, people came to Minnesota to work in meat-packing jobs in the western part of the state. By 2010, according to Ahmed Ismail Yusuf, author of Somalis in Minnesota, their numbers had grown to somewhere between 36,000 (the U.S. census number) and 70,000 (the community’s estimate). Before long, you could find places like Qoraxlow across Minneapolis. For someone like myself, with young kids and little extra money for the kind of globetrotting I did when I was younger, these places felt like an escape. Sometimes I would meet old Somali men who spoke Italian and young ones who spoke Swahili. I could eat sambusas and drink chai and feel refreshingly far from home.

Read the rest here.