News
More "Playtime" with Friends!
I still miss a friend who has been lost to me for more than thirty-five years.
"Sherry" and I shared an apartment in our early twenties in Texas and when Sherry's boyfriend--older, feckless, unemployed and endlessly thirsty for Vodka Greyhounds (I still hate him!)--turned our two bedroom bachelorette pad into a thruple, I moved out.
And a friendship that had begun in middle school was broken. Irreparably, as it turns out.
What I remember most about that friendship, though, was how it was forged in endless hours of just hanging out: nothing more than gossiping, listening to music, talking about books... and more gossiping.
My parents would drop me off at Sherry's house on a Saturday afternoon and collect me after church on Sunday and those luxurious hours were spent on nothing scheduled, nothing planned. Just delightful hours to fill being together.
I thought about how this friendship had developed and deepened so naturally when I read an Atlantic article last month that was headlined, "What Adults Forget About Friendship."
The writer, Rhaina Cohen, argues that it's possible to maintain an "ageless" approach to the vibrancy and vitality of friendship. You just need a more playful approach to it. "Friends," she says, "could choose to confide in each other over a meal, but the activity doesn't inherently invite the type of uninhibited openness that play can."
Sheila Liming who wrote, "Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time" suggests that scheduling infrequent dinners or your monthly girlfriends brunch creates pressure to "perform" the friendship. "That's a really damaging way to see our interactions," Liming said in a New York Times interview.
In her memoir about separating from the father of her toddler daughter, Leslie Jamison writes of returning to the steadiness and calming comfort of her friends. "Romance was what I'd always felt most consumed by," she writes in "Splinters," but my relationships with women were the ones I'd trusted more. They built and rebuilt my inner architecture."
One of my favorite and most memorable experiences on a busy and highly structured trip to France years ago was a blissfully relaxed afternoon spent with a friend in the sun-drenched gardens at Fontainebleau.
We munched on cheese and baguettes, read the novels we'd packed and cherished our good fortune to be in Paris, in May, together.
Cuba, 2026 Itinerary is up!
If you've reached out to me about February, 2026 Women to Women Friendship & Adventure in Cuba, feast your eyes, Sirens! The new itinerary is here! It includes some of my favorite things from 2024 and some new experiences that I just couldn't live without.
Conde Nast recently declared Cuba one of this hemisphere's most exciting destinations. A small deposit will hold your place.
https://www.sirensojourns.com/upcoming-retreats
Have Books, Must Travel.
Siren Sojourners, you have always been ahead of the pack when it comes to book-inspired travel. Now the rest of the world is catching up.
CN Traveler recently declared book tourism one of 2025's hottest travel trends, citing polling in which a high percentage of travelers said that a novel had prompted them to choose a destination to explore.
Esquire Magazine described beach side reading retreats (Been there, done that! And doing it some more!) and a Danube River cruise in which writer Gillian Flynn sailed with some of her biggest fans.
The "Life of Pi" and "Covenant of Water" expeditions to India in 2025, (Waiting List) are, of course, based on two indelibly magnificent novels.
And "The Sheltering Sky" by Paul Bowles, is inspiring our April, 2026 adventure to Morocco.
Adore a vivid novel that you think would make a great guide for a Siren adventure? Email me. I'd love to hear about it. SirenSojourns@gmail.com.
Roam to Read Book for March: Dream State by Eric Puchner
Meeting your beloved’s best friend from college can be a dicey proposition…especially when that friend shows up…unwanted….unkempt….and wearing a hat that looked like it had been chewed up by a donkey. I laughed out loud when I read that description!
Indeed, Cece will find this dear friend Garrett so odd that….quote–”for a moment, the man she was about to marry seemed like a stranger.”
And, in fact, Garrett’s arrival on the eve of Cece’s wedding will have unimagined and rather ruinous consequences for the groom.
But don’t be mislead! This is so much more than a wedding gone wrong story!
When Eric and I talked (the day after Oprah announced she had chosen Dream State for her Book Club) our conversation roamed from the mysteries of male friendship to the question of whether to love someone like you or wonderfully, challengingly different.
Our interview airs on MPR on April 25th.
Four Craters in Four Hours
By night, jaguars and pumas roam the cloud forest trails of Mombacho Volcano just outside Granada, Nicaragua.
By day, intrepid hikers (whose legs will be quivering like jelly by the end!) climb and climb, ascending past fumaroles (steaming vents) colossal Elephant Ears ferns and towering, spreading trees on a four hour quest to see each one of this ancient volcano's craters.
Pirates roamed the seas and an English queen was excommunicated by a vengeful pope when Mombacho last erupted in 1570. But the scars of that eruption remain starkly visible.
Deep gulches that once carried lava score the flank of the volcano and a dead forest strewn with fallen trees and petrifying wood reveals how toxic the volcano's sulphurous emissions still are.
I found Nicaragua, with its pristine lakes, thriving rain forests, volcanic islands and remarkable wildlife to be a wondrous place and the well-traveled Mark Twain will back me up on this.
On an expedition in 1866, Twain marveled at the country's untamed beauty, writing of the volcanoes that rise from Ometepe Island (we were there!): "They look so isolated from the world and its turmoil--so tranquil, so dreamy, so steeped in slumber and eternal repose."
Bob the Robin
Ron Charles at the Washington Post is one of my all-time fave book critics and one of the reasons I still subscribe.
His reading life is audacious and he never fails to surprise and delight me.
Check out this terrific review for a book that arrived at the end of a wicked week for Ron and turned out to be just what he needed!
"Some books can serve as little boxes of chocolates, too. Over the last few days, I sneaked away from several demanding novels to find solace in “Bob the Robin,” by a photographer and gardener named Tony Putman.
Presented as “a love letter to Britain’s favourite bird,” this nature memoir goes down warm and gentle, like a bowl of farina in print.
“I discovered that I was at peace when I was using my camera,” Putman writes. “Every negative thought, every problem, was blocked out when I was thinking about my next shot.” That salubrious hobby runs parallel with his keen attention to animals, particularly birds.
In 2019, a new robin approached him, and they established a remarkable rapport. “If he was in the middle of a song, he might look at me to acknowledge my presence or he might completely ignore me,” Putman writes. “When I wanted him to move to a better location for a photo, he would simply follow me wherever I went.” The bird eats mealworms from Putman’s lips.
Putman’s Facebook followers christened the bird “Bob.” Over the next several years, Bob the Robin and Putman the Gardener became media celebrities, but that doesn’t really matter to Putman nor, I suppose, to Bob.
“Sometimes in life you get to meet someone you feel at one with,” Putman writes. “It’s not always something you understand or can explain, but it’s there, and you both feel it.”
Okay, not exactly Montaigne, but you do feel it because Putman is such an achingly sincere writer. His long friendship with an English robin — different from our American robin — is plainly, unapologetically heartwarming."