Dearest Readers, When Susanna Wickes and I started Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine nearly three years ago, we were just a couple of twenty-something cultural explorers who spent most days eating aloo ghobi from street vendors in a park full of ancient ruins and bright green parrots. Since then, we have each stretched into new places and different worlds: Susanna married Mr. Wang, learned a new language, and won the hearts of Inner Mongolian students and grandmothers alike. […]

Categories: Travel & Literature

Dearest Readers, This morning I climbed up to a lookout point over a crater in the Negev desert, Israel. You don’t get landscapes much more different from the English countryside I grew up with. Distances, depths, hills, and rocks without much growing but somehow very alive. On a sign, someone had stenciled: “See yourself in everything.” It lifted me to think of that link, but of course beautiful landscapes aren’t the only thing I see when I travel. I see […]

Categories: Travel & Literature

Editor’s Note | Fall 2013 Dear Readers, Much has happened since we decided, this summer, to switch to quarterly publication, and we could not be more excited to announce that our first anthology of nonfiction, Whereabouts: Stepping Out of Place, was released by 2Leaf Press, New York yesterday. We are fiercely proud of our contributors and their journeys, and have been receiving humbling feedback, such as this: “We think of travel and life abroad as pivoting on geographic place, but […]

Categories: Travel & Literature

Dear readers, During her keynote address at the Edinburgh World Writer’s Conference this year, the Turkish writer Sema Kaygusuz said: “A person with a vocabulary can only make sense of their world when they are part of a dialogue. A person shares their language. And just as this language identifies them as a local, at the same time it makes them a citizen not just of their own country but of the world.” -from A National Literature by Sema Kaygusuz, […]

Categories: Travel & Literature

Dear Readers, “Traveling is a brutality.” Given that Outside In focuses on travel and journeys, ostensibly regarding them as pleasurable, this quote from Italian poet and novelist Cesare Pavese, might seem like an odd choice for the opening remarks of Issue Thirteen. And yet, I believe there is truth to this statement, especially as Pavese continues: “It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. […]

Categories: Travel & Literature

Dearest Readers, In honor of National Poetry Month, Joseph Epstein had this to say in this month’s The Wall Street Journal about old versus new poetry: “But nearly all the poetry written since the years those poets wrote doesn’t register, resonate, ring, do any of the elevating things that poetry is supposed to, and once indeed did, do.” He continues with a declaration that “otherwise the poetry game is over, kaput, fini, time, gentlemen, time.” Well, everyone is entitled to […]

Categories: Travel & Literature

“One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, shut the door. Five, six, pick up sticks. Seven, eight, lay them straight . Nine, ten, a big fat hen!” -Excerpt from a Popular English-language Nursery Rhyme Welcome, travel pups. As a result of having made some major changes to the magazine, Issue Ten has been on my mind a lot this month. Several nights in a row recently, head nested firmly in my pillow, I  replayed “Issue Ten, a big fat hen” […]

Categories: Travel & Literature