United States
Freelance writer, archaeologist, and occasional cemetery tour guide.
It was all somewhat routine to the teenage girl. The reports of seventy-five-mile-per-hour winds, the landfall predictions, the mayor's call for evacuation all stealing radio waves from the Beatles and Tom Jones. Shopping for bread, water, and canned meats. Sitting in her mother's station wagon crammed full of suitcases and baby brothers.
When Nicole Waguespack describes the Louisiana coastline, she thinks back to the early 1980s. In her memories, she's still a little girl standing in the hot sun on the bank of a small canal near her daddy's hunting and fishing camp.
Years passed this way. The grocery captured the attention of the occasional local newspaper, of European tourists following the "blues highway," and of Southern art professors, who included it in their folk-art slideshows. Margaret and Preacher were photographed for books and featured in National Geographic Traveler.
Ten years ago, if you'd asked Timothy Gipson what he knew about tea, he'd have probably shrugged and told you he liked it iced. That was before his husband, Jason McDonald, dragged him along on a tour of the Charleston Tea Plantation in South Carolina, the only large-scale tea-growing operation in the United States.
For Carla Jenkins and her barge company, Vidalia Dock & Storage, the best towboat trips down the Mississippi are boring. What she worries about are all the ways they can get interesting. A runaway barge could t-bone a bridge, sending cars plunging into the water below.
2,000 word feature combining first-person travel narrative with historic research
3,000 word feature combining first-person travel narrative with historic research
At a festival in an Italian town, Kerry Rose Graning learns that you can cherish an experience even as you let it go.
1,500 word feature on a music/food event with interviews