The Lifecycle of Butterflies
In Michoacán, the migrating mariposas appear with November, as if trailing the marigolds trucked in for Day of the Dead. They come by the fragile millions…
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Fire Ants
In those first months living in El Salvador, had I walked down a village street and seen young men leaning against gaping doorframes…
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Writers Respond to Typhoon Haiyan
On ordinary days, this is a magazine of creative nonfiction, inspired by travel, written by women–by which we mean that Vela publishes writing that…
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That Spanish September
When I graduated from college, in the spring of 2001, it seemed to me that where I situated myself, where I’d been and wherever I went next…
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Interview with Vela’s Featured Writer: Amy Butcher
You and I met a little over a year ago at Colgate University, when I was the out-going Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative…
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Map to Motherland
This morning, Steven and I woke up late and tired because our two-year-old had been up twice in the night dreaming about scary dinosaurs…
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Reading Emily Rapp
To read Emily Rapp’s memoir The Still Point of the Turning World is to have that life river that you’re navigating—an eddy here, a riffle there…
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On Packing
It is best to use a well-made bed or the floor, so long as you have a large, smooth, clear surface, a canvas, if you will.
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Featured Writer: Sidsel Overgaard
Sidsel Overgaard is a public radio journalist who has reported on topics ranging from how a once-popular pregnancy test led to the endangerment of…
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The Jackass Prize
Clayton may be in possession of the only Ivy League degree between us, but he arrived in New Mexico without either a sleeping bag or hiking boots…
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Fellowship and the Emerging Writer
Sitting in my half-packed office at Colgate, I gazed outside at the spring rain dampening the old stone buildings of that beautiful campus.
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Who Made this Grave
One day, in late October, my son and I left his Mexican preschool and wandered up the Calzada toward Morelia’s pink stone aqueduct.
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