With time off of work and school lurking around the corner, many of us look forward to visiting exotic destinations and escaping the seemingly oppressive routine of daily life. But as the stories in this month’s issue of InTheFray suggest, the grass isn’t always greener across the pond.

We begin with John Liebhardt’s exploration of what happens when young men journey to the big city in Burkina Faso in hopes of finding good work and accumulating wealth. The water pushers he profiles in A drop in the bucket find that simply getting a hand on a rung of the ladder requires innovative thinking and a great deal of persuasion.

Meanwhile, in part two of his photo essay Vanishing heritage, Pulitzer Prize winner and ITF Advisory Board member John Kaplan documents the indigenous traditions of the Tibetan, Aymara, and Akha peoples even as immigration and industrialization threaten their disappearance.

Even in the imagination, there’s no going back to a place of sufficiency. In her pair of poems Marissa Ranello contemplates the way hunger and need transform us. And Katharine Tillman explores who bears responibility for our lost innocence in Land of enchantment, her tale of a teenager who runs away to be with her boyfriend, only to wind up pregnant, broke, and more alone than ever.

On a lighter note, ITF Contributing Writer Ayah-Victoria McKhail struggles to fit in on a Spanish nude beach, where she ultimately decides that her native Toronto’s beaches, dirty as they may be, might better accommodate her penchant for clothing.

Finally, be sure to check back on Monday, November 21, when JDGuilford unravels age-old myths about gay black men in his review of Keith Boykin’s Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America, and ITF Contributing Writer Emily Alpert exposes the abuse and harassment faced by transgendered prisoners in California.

Laura Nathan
Editor
Buffalo, New York

Coming in December: ITF publishes its 50th issue and brings you something old and something new to commemorate the first 49 issues.

Laura Nathan-Garner