Skip to content

ELAYNE CLIFT INTRODUCES HER LATEST BOOK at Next Stage

May
10
ELAYNE CLIFT INTRODUCES HER LATEST BOOK at Next Stage
Next Stage Arts presents award-winning author Elayne Clift’s book launch event as part of its ongoing literary series, Next Stage Speaks, on Friday, May 10, 2019 at 7:00 pm, hosted by Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord. Clift’s 13th book, Around the World in Fifty Years: Travel Tales of a Not So Innocent Abroad, is a collection of selected stories about her global travels, told in prose and poetry. There is a suggested donation at the door of $10. The book begins: “All my life I have disagreed with David Henry Thoreau: Unlike him, I definitely think it is “worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” Clift, an intrepid traveler who has visited almost 100 countries on every continent except Antarctica for both work and pleasure, says she caught the travel bug as a youngster when her family took annual summer trips to Canada to visit relatives. “That was in the days before interstate highways and Holiday Inns,” she recalls. “We traveled scenic roads in New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont, staying in AAA-approved motels and eating breakfast in Howard Johnson’s. There was always a stop in Niagara Falls for a ride on the Maid of the Mist, and a room at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. It was pure heaven.” Clift’s travel memoir is not a Fodor’s Guide. It shares personal stories, vignettes, photographs, and postscripts that range from poignant to hilarious. There are scenes from Indian railway stations to rural Romanian villages. Along the way readers meet the people who made her travel special, ranging from a professor in Jordan to a desert driver in Dubai to an elderly artist in France. One reviewer has called the book “a treasure of armchair travel.” A popular writing workshop leader and lecturer, Clift is widely published internationally. Her columns appear regularly in two New England newspapers and on various blogs, and her stories, poetry, travel writing, and essays have frequently been anthologized. Her novel, Hester’s Daughters, based on The Scarlet Letter,appeared in 2012 and her third short story collection, Children of the Chalet, received the Award for Excellence in Fiction from Greyden Press in 2014. Clift continues to agree with Mark Twain: Travel is still enticing, not least because it is “fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” Like Mr. Twain, whose account of one trip gave us Innocents Abroad,she thinks “it would be well if such an excursion could be got up every year and the system regularly inaugurated.” Chard deNiord is the Vermont Poet Laureate. He is the author of numerous books of poems, and a book of interviews with seven senior American poets. A co-founder of the New England College MFA Program in Poetry, he works as a Professor of English at Providence College and lives in Westminster West. Next Stage Arts Project, winner of a National Endowment for the Arts and ArtPlace America grants, is a non-profit organization dedicated to revitalizing Putney’s cultural and economic village center through theprogramming, development and operation of Next Stage. The newly renovated performance space at 15 Kimball Hill is now accessible, comfortable and air-conditioned.
Date and Time
May 10, 2019 @ 7:00 pm
Location
Next Stage
15 Kimball Hill
Putney
VT 05346
Contact
rweisel
802-387-0102
Email
Event website
Calendar



Next Stage Arts presents award-winning author Elayne Clift’s book launch event as part of its ongoing literary series, Next Stage Speaks, on Friday, May 10, 2019 at 7:00 pm, hosted by Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord. Clift’s 13th book, Around the World in Fifty Years: Travel Tales of a Not So Innocent Abroad, is a collection of selected stories about her global travels, told in prose and poetry.

There is a suggested donation at the door of $10.

The book begins: “All my life I have disagreed with David Henry Thoreau: Unlike him, I definitely think it is “worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”

Clift, an intrepid traveler who has visited almost 100 countries on every continent except Antarctica for both work and pleasure, says she caught the travel bug as a youngster when her family took annual summer trips to Canada to visit relatives.

“That was in the days before interstate highways and Holiday Inns,” she recalls. “We traveled scenic roads in New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont, staying in AAA-approved motels and eating breakfast in Howard Johnson’s. There was always a stop in Niagara Falls for a ride on the Maid of the Mist, and a room at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. It was pure heaven.”

Clift’s travel memoir is not a Fodor’s Guide. It shares personal stories, vignettes, photographs, and postscripts that range from poignant to hilarious. There are scenes from Indian railway stations to rural Romanian villages. Along the way readers meet the people who made her travel special, ranging from a professor in Jordan to a desert driver in Dubai to an elderly artist in France.

One reviewer has called the book “a treasure of armchair travel.”

A popular writing workshop leader and lecturer, Clift is widely published internationally. Her columns appear regularly in two New England newspapers and on various blogs, and her stories, poetry, travel writing, and essays have frequently been anthologized. Her novel, Hester’s Daughters, based on The Scarlet Letter,appeared in 2012 and her third short story collection, Children of the Chalet, received the Award for Excellence in Fiction from Greyden Press in 2014.

Clift continues to agree with Mark Twain: Travel is still enticing, not least because it is “fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” Like Mr. Twain, whose account of one trip gave us Innocents Abroad,she thinks “it would be well if such an excursion could be got up every year and the system regularly inaugurated.”

Chard deNiord is the Vermont Poet Laureate. He is the author of numerous books of poems, and a book of interviews with seven senior American poets. A co-founder of the New England College MFA Program in Poetry, he works as a Professor of English at Providence College and lives in Westminster West.

Next Stage Arts Project, winner of a National Endowment for the Arts and ArtPlace America grants, is a non-profit organization dedicated to revitalizing Putney’s cultural and economic village center through theprogramming, development and operation of Next Stage. The newly renovated performance space at 15 Kimball Hill is now accessible, comfortable and air-conditioned.

| Next Stage Arts Project |