Anne Breedlove
Part-Time Nomads: Traveling the World by Bicycle

Diane LeBow
Dancing on the Wine-Dark Sea: Memoir of a
Trailblazing Woman’s Travels, Adventures and Romance

MJ Pramik
Travels on the Edge: One Woman’s
Journeys on a Runaway Planet

Free. Seat reservations accepted by phone at 415-586-3733.
Reservations honored until the event begins at 7pm.

Three writers with a hunger for knowledge and experience of the wider world, their individual reasons and preoccupations and their unique insights converge at Bird & Beckett to read from their work and to entertain your own thoughts, insights and questions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Anne Breedlove’s Part Time Nomads is part memoir, part travelogue and one hundred percent ode to taking on crazy challenges no matter your age or life situation. The book focuses on Anne and her husband’s evolution from weekend cyclists to fully loaded, self-contained international bicycle travelers. Averaging eight miles an hour, they braved rain and snow and junk food, learning hard lessons about bad maps, road-hogging motor homes and the unpredictable road ahead.

Mile by mile, their endurance and ambition increased. Soon they ventured further afield. Being together 24/7, attempting things they’d never done before, wasn’t always easy. Friends thought they were crazy, but loved their tales of plunging into icy rivers, singing to ward off bears and tossing salad in a grocery bag. The people they met, in campgrounds and dive bars, were as memorable as the places.

For Anne, animating these stories conjured the incredible rush of getting places under her own steam, being self-reliant, and re-learning that she and Jim worked pretty damned well as a team, reigniting a passion not only for cycling, but for each other.

In April, Breedlove will be performing a 20-minute monologue from her book at The Marsh Theater, 1062 Valencia. https://themarsh.org/mnmarshstream/#gsc.tab=0

Diane LeBow’s Dancing on the Wine-Dark Sea, an International Book Award Finalist, takes the reader to places and experiences they’ve likely never imagined. The stories she relates are passionate, poignant, funny, sometimes tragic, and always unexpected. Share a meal with Corsican rebels in the ragged mountains of this ancient island, meet a black stallion in a blizzard on the Mongolian steppes, assist Afghan women exiled in Tajikistan in writing a Declaration of their Rights for the new Constitution, and savor a love affair with an elegant French Baron.

LeBow gives the reader peeks behind the curtains into women’s and men’s lives around the world in the search for answers to universal human questions such as how to experience the best our world offers, ways to balance our desire for love with yearning for freedom and adventure, and longing for a sense of home within ourselves and in our worlds.

LeBow is an award-winning writer and photojournalist, professor emerita and president emerita of the Bay Area Travel Writers. Her work has appeared in multiple anthologies, including Best Women’s Travel Writing and numerous other publications. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Douglass College (Rutgers University) for her writing, photojournalism, women’s rights work, and as a pioneer of women’s studies and innovative college teaching in Paris, Holland and the USA. She earned one of the first Ph.Ds in Women’s Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her travels have taken her to almost 100 countries.

MJ Pramik’s Travels on the Edge offers stories of adventure and personal evolution against the backdrop of the climate crisis. These essays and poems reflect upon two decades of journeys around the globe, offering wisdom for developing a conscious mind for sustainable travel as the planet’s catastrophic transformations come to the fore. Today, MJ begins each new expedition prepared for interruption by some radical encounter – whether it be war, extreme weather, drought, a pandemic…or simply major flight cancellations. She meets each of these challenges with a grateful excitement and renewed dedication to further care for this planet.

Readers of her anthology are encouraged to become ethical travelers themselves, turning their focus towards honoring the far corners of the earth even as storm clouds hover above us.

MJ (Mary Jean) Pramik has hitchhiked across the United States, tallied sharp-taloned vultures in Mongolia, tagged and released leopard catsharks off the coast of South Africa and deflected bill collectors in San Francisco. Her articles, essays and poems have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Good Housekeeping and over a dozen travel anthologies, winning several Solas Travel Writing awards.