©2010 by Cheryl McLaughlin

Moguls skier Alex Bilodeau won the first Gold medal for Canada at the Vancouver Olympic Games and credited his older brother who has cerebral palsy.

At the last Olympics, American skater Evan Lysacek had a disastrous short program performance that took him out of any contention for a medal. This time he won the Gold medal beating reigning Olympic Champion, Yevgeny Pleshenko.

19-year old figure skater Kim Yu-Na from South Korea carried the hopes of a nation and the heavy expectations of gold as she took the ice and turned in two of the most spectacular performances in the history of Olympic Women’s Figure Skating.

So, what does this have to do with writing?

©2010 by Patricia Bracewell

On a sunny July day in Fecamp, Normandy, I stood in front of the stony corpse of an 11th century ducal palace, studying the ruin before me with the eyes of an Independent Scholar. That’s an impressive way of saying that I was a history student without the benefit of credentials, university affiliation, or professors.

Make a New Year’s Resolution to write for Roadwork in 2010. Left Coast Writers on-line column is published bi-monthly, and editor Pat Bracewell is looking for 1000-word essays about writing, travel and any combination thereof from LCW members. Contact Pat at Roadwork@LeftCoastWriters.com.

©2009 by Chana Wilson

The tiny Calistoga airport sits at one end of the Napa Valley town of Calistoga, a tourist resort known for its hot springs.  Along the town’s one main street are the spas boasting various treatments: mud baths, hot whirlpools, massage.  My mother and I have come here for my 30th birthday, but not to seek the waters. 

© 2009 by Joanna Biggar

January 21, 2009…For forty years I have been going to the National Mall to celebrate, to witness and to participate in history. I’ve been there to see marathons and hootenannies, Grandmothers for Peace, Students for the Earth, reunions of the Peace Corps, and a Million Men’s March.

In the early days, the days of Lyndon Johnson in the late ‘60’s, the country was torn asunder by what was perceived as an unjust war. Led by youth – and I was then young – thousands came to march against the relentless killing in Southeast Asia in a fruitless and seemingly endless war. Among those who were dying were thousands of my own generation, drafted, disillusioned, and angry.

© 2009 by Patricia Woeber

Alpes-Maritimes, France

The Cote d’Azur brings to mind luxurious hotels and the cachet of the Mediterranean coast stretching from Cannes to Menton, yet this strip of land is connected to another world. To the north, a mountainous backcountry offers a diversity of cultures and outdoor activities.

Both elegant coast and wild backcountry are part of the Alpes-Maritimes departement, which is tucked along the Italian border in southeastern France. This area of Provence possesses the seaside, the mountains (as high as Mt. Gelas at 10,300 feet) with an alpine landscape of fir forests, and the high rocky land of the Mercantour National Park. So why not enjoy it all? Stay in deluxe hotels, discover ancient hillside villages, puzzle over ancient pictographs, and hike in nature so dramatic it will knock your socks off.

©2009 by Toni Piccinini

Is there a better launching off point for positive change than New Year’s Day? Nope, not much beats January 1st as the beginning of the new you. A whole new year awaits for the writer in you to make your mark.  Fresh and unspoiled by editor rejections and by your own sketchy writing habits, that fat January is all about possibilities.  All the excess of the holiday season, the “might as well wait ‘till the first of the year” procrastination, and the sludgy sloth are but a faint memory after midnight December 31st.  You have improvement plans for this New Year.  This year you will finish that novel, this year you will send out that stack of short stories languishing in the drawer; hell, this year you’re going to quit smoking, lose weight, get fit, and find your soul mate.

© 2008 Rebecca Foust

YOUR BABIES

You care for them
soap their backs
pick nits from
each strand of hair;
nourish and starve
them for their own
good; discipline
them into line;

They grow, get
rowdy, take on
lives of their own,
so you send
them off make
their way
in the world, earn
some dough.

Then you wait,
and wait and wait
for the news;
Will there be a
train crash?
A cure for cancer
or maybe
the Swine Flu?

Until some
Grad student editor
not much older
than them
(but much, much
younger
than you)

© 2008 by Laurie McAndish King

Do you know that in Australia the globes are just like American ones, with Australia on the bottom? It boggles my imagination to think about all those people Down Under knowing they live on the bottom of the world, knowing they’re walking around upside down all the time. This would not be the case, of course, if they simply re-drew all the globes to show the southern hemisphere at the top.  Why not do this?

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© 2008 Wendy Nelson Tokunaga

I was addicted.

Unlike the mid-1990s, when I first started on the long road of attempting to get a novel published, in the 2000’s it was possible to query literary agents by email. No more dropping snail mail query letters with a SASE into the post box and waiting weeks or months for a reply. No more wear and tear on my printer, and no need to schlep to the post office to send out a partial or, if I were lucky, a full manuscript. Now when an agent asked to see all or part of my novel, I could send it as an attachment, or paste an excerpt in the email itself.

© 2008 Kate Amatruda

Tuesday, February 20
1128 Hours
Scrunched into a slippery orange chair at the DMV, I’m waiting with my 15-1/2 year old son to see what he needs to do to get a learner’s permit. With my Supermom powers of detecting danger where none exists, I’m conjuring up exploding gas tanks, road rage and high-speed crashes. I shudder at the picture of my boy in a vehicle going 65 mph. My nickname as a child was “Chicken Little” for my propensity to worry that the sky was falling.

Wendy Merrill’s March/April column, “How Chasing Mr. Wrong Led to Mr. Write,” is still front and center at Roadwork on the Left Coast Writers site – http://www.leftcoastwriters.com/category/road-work/ – but you’ve already read it, right? Now, if you haven’t submitted something to Roadwork yet yourself, what are you waiting for? Contact Pat to submit your story or to pitch an idea. Roadwork@Leftcoastwriters.com.Are you ready for Roadwork?

Roadwork is the LeftCoastWriters.com on-line column about travel, writing and the writer’s life. All members of Left Coast Writers are welcome to submit an essay of 800 to 1000 words to editor Pat Bracewell at Roadwork@Leftcoastwriters.com for on-line publication. A new Roadwork column is posted on our website every other month.

© 2008 by Wendy Merrill

The reason I attended the Maui Writers Conference that year was not because I’d dutifully saved my money, planned ahead, and was finally ready to put myself out there after years of hiding behind my fear of being rejected in a noble effort to publish my yet-to-be-written memoir. No, the real reason I decided to attend the conference that year was simply because I was chasing yet another good-looking-commitment-phobic-he’s-just-not-that-into-me man/boy with mother issues with whom I’d had a brief affair while on vacation in Maui, and I wanted to appear to have a legitimate reason to return to the scene of the crime.

© 2007 by Joanna Biggar

They called us the ‘Thelma and Louise’ of journalism. But when we first set out in 1993, doing America for our Washington-based wire service, we weren’t quite up to the part. Though she took to calling me Thelma and I took to calling her Louise, we were really just plain Ann and plain Joanna, unarmed, harmless and quite unlikely to kill.

In June of this year Writers Workshops International organizers, Barbara Euser and Connie Burke took yet another group of writers out on an amazing travel writing adventure. This time the participants journeyed through County Cork, Ireland. Writers Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Joanna Biggar directed workshops in between the far-ranging peregrinations. This, again, is some serious “Roadwork.” The anthology containing all of their stories will be out in December, distributed nationally by Travelers’ Tales. Meanwhile here are some excerpts from a few of their delightful stories…

© 2007 by Nicole Clausing

Working at home means I see what goes on around the block during working hours. The woman who lives across the street may wonder what Buddy, her white terrier, does all day alone while she’s at work, but I know. (A lot of standing on the couch, making nose prints on the window, and barking at people walking by.)

For a short spell in April of this year a small group of Left Coast Writers became part of the world that inspired Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner and Harper Lee. Their hosts, Martha Greenway and Mary Brent Cantarutti, both South Carolina natives, invited them to visit the rural South and write about it—definitely “Roadwork” as we see it. Here is a collection of excerpts from works-in-progress.
— Linda Watanabe McFerrin

© 2007 by Elizabeth Weaver

• Do pregnant whales get morning sickness?
• How do you protect yourself from writing scams?
• Androgynous hermaphrodite pronoun?
• Useful websites for writers?

These are some of the thousands of questions asked and answered by fellow writers on NaNoWriMo forums. While NaNoWriMo may sound like a tiny rhinoceros, it’s actually short for National Novel Writing Month, which happens each November through www.nanowrimo.org.

Where Gods Walked© 2007 by Patricia Bracewell

It was nearly twilight as I navigated my way on foot down the steep curves of the only street that winds through Positano, Italy. I had arrived by ferry the night before, but had had little chance until this moment to experience Positano itself. Now, having watched from my hotel terrace as the late October sun turned the town’s cream colored houses to gold, I had ventured out to see what the place had to offer. The sun had disappeared behind the limestone cliffs that ring the town when I emerged from a stairway into a little piazza. To my surprise I found myself facing a large ceramic plaque proclaiming that John Steinbeck had once lived there, and that he had immortalized Positano in an essay that he wrote forHarper’s Bazaar in 1953.

Discovering the Heart of Copper Canyon

A lone Tarahumara woman sits in the shade of the trees on the edge of the cliff above our hotel. I watch her from the hotel terrace about a hundred yards below. I can tell who she is from the bright pink skirt, yellow print blouse and the green scarf that frames her dark hair and skin. She sits quietly after a long day of weaving baskets and dealing with tourists – a difficult transition for a shy tribal woman whose culture is not open or aggressive.

© 1993 Christine Krieg

My story begins with a community of a thousand men and women.  Okay, okay, mostly men and let me tell you, I didn’t mind that one bit! We were traversing the east coast of Tassie (that’s Aussie slang for Tasmania, that island to the south of Australia that once got left off an official map. That ought to tell you a thing or two about how isolated some of the folks here might feel.  Who can blame them for doing things their own special way?)

by Cheryl McLaughlin

It was one of those third-shift nights.  I was done with the busyness of the day and the silence of nighttime surrounded me like a huge bubble—that safe place where I could finally hear myself think—when I sat down to write yet another practical, bulleted how-to article, “The 7 Keys to Managing Competitive Stress.” But this wasn’t just any article. It was an opportunity, for I was one of the few professionals—and the only woman—asked to be a contributor to The Sport Psychology Manual for Coaches, a publication which would be used to train coaches throughout the country. Once again, I was up against a should have been done yesterday deadline and I was praying for clarity.

by Robin Sparks

There are the plans you have for your journey, and the plans your journey has for you.

Things to do in San Rafael, Argentina:

1. Get an appendectomy.

We were watching the gauchos gallop into town when it was decided that I should see a doctor. I’d felt queasy all day, but, when it began to hurt when I breathed, I knew it was more than the bottle of Malbec wine we’d drunk the night before.

By Deborah Griffin
Roadworks: Deborah
I pressed the bumper sticker onto my dashboard. Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere. It was my mantra for the trip I was about to take. For the first time in my life I would be on the road with no destination. Every other trip I’d taken was charted to within an inch of its life, mapped and reserved ahead with a quota of miles per day. Not this one. Part spiritual quest, part art journey, this would be a trip with time to think, to make decisions about the rest of my life. On the passenger seat lay a new journal, its smooth pages ready to record with words and sketches the adventures that lay before me.

By Marsha Black

By December of 2001, a quiet blanket of winter white covered Yosemite Valley. The event was so unusual that it made the local news for a week, catching the attention of Bay Area residents, including my husband and myself.
I think most of us needed relief from the personal and national disasters of 2001. We certainly did. Mentally and physically exhausted, our enthusiasm and energy flagged. Our bodies ached. Instinctively, we turned to Yosemite’s familiar retreat, hoping that the pristine beauty would refill our spiritual and physical reserves.

By Nancy E Rapp

In the fall of 2003 I found myself intrigued by the lyrics of Loreena McKennitt’s song,

Dante’s Prayer.

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me.

I wondered what it was that McKennitt wanted us to remember about Dante, who was, to me, a rather mysterious figure from the Middle Ages. I did a little research into the historical Dante Alighieri, and some of what I discovered struck me as significant in today’s post-9/11 world.

by Claire Savage

When I first heard about the trip to the Arctic, visions of polar bears, reindeer, and jolly old Santa Claus danced in my head.  Childhood fairy tale scenes of The North Pole were all I knew of land and sea beyond latitude 50 degrees north, having never ventured farther north than Vancouver, British Columbia.  In spite of my fairy tale images I still feared the journey to this remote hinterland.  Would the barren landscape and frigid temperatures be too much to bear?