Molly Beer is a terrible traveler. She reads books about Africa while camping in Tibet, prepares food she learned to make in Italy in her Mexican kitchen, or writes obsessively about El Salvador while living on a rooftop in Ecuador. Worse still, she can’t pack, she suffers from motion sickness, she is terrified of volcanoes, and she once (three days into the Aldo Leopold Wilderness) tore up the map. And yet, here she is. Wherever here is.
A former contributing editor and founding member of Vela, Molly Beer’s travel writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, and Best Women’s Travel Writing, among other publications, and has been deemed “Notable” by Best American Travel Writing. She is a former Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University. Read more about her work at www.mollybeer.net.
Stories by Molly:
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...–Read more
In those first months living in El Salvador, had I walked down a village street and seen young men leaning against gaping doorframes...–Read more
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...–Read more
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...–Read more
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...–Read more
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... –Read more
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...–Read more
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. –Read more
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...–Read more
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...–Read more
Sitting in my half-packed office at Colgate, I gazed outside at the spring rain dampening the old stone buildings of that beautiful campus. –Read more
One day, in late October, my son and I left his Mexican preschool and wandered up the Calzada toward Morelia’s pink stone aqueduct. –Read more
Thirty-two intrepid travelers and eloquent writers have contributed to the 2012 edition of this popular anthology series, including Vela’s own Lauren Quinn and Molly...–Read more
Having a horse here is like having a motorbike in the city,” Bhupendra Sherchan explained the first day we rode out together on the flanks of snow-capped Nilgiri.–Read more
