I have slept on a hundred islands
where books were trees.
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dear Friends & Strangers,

I grew up on islands very different from the one I am writing from now. My first letters came shortly after my seventh birthday from the southernmost islands in the Caribbean. I wrote with pencils in a time of spiral notebooks and tape decks and airmail envelopes. I wrote from islands, cities, passenger planes and guest bedrooms. Now, I am typing all this from the side of a volcanic rock in the Pacific that I call home. The moon flips around like a coin tossed in the air, men sweat all day paving new highways into the jungle, and I write from one small chair in the mountains. I write away midnights. I write through dawns. At first, it never mattered much to who. I’d write to anyone. Living on one of the most isolated land masses on earth can inspire that. After surviving a decade of weather and salt out here, uncertain whether I’d make it back to the great cities and cultures of the world, that changed. I stared out at the flat sea, across dirt roads and forgotten bays- and I wanted to write to someone. All the people that really meant something to me while I was out here alone on this rock. So that’s what I think you’ll find here. Old letters that became poems and filled out into chapters before they became snapshots and status updates and a website, a proverbial shoebox of past notes and private scribbles. There is that writing motto: know your audience. And I feel certain that I do now. I am writing for everyone who is very far away, the best of friends and strangers alike in distance, letters like plane tickets to hop the oceans between us. I hope I will have the chance to write more in the days ahead.

love and a coin tossed in the air,
Elizabeth.