I am a member of Townsend 11, a collective of eleven Northern California writers (including one who’s been living in Barcelona for several years) who meet monthly in a converted brick warehouse on Townsend Street in San Francisco.
If you like the adventures published in Travelers’ Tales, Lonely Planet, and other creative anthologies, you’ll enjoy our bundle of thought-provoking stories. We aim to share stories that enlighten, entertain, and inspire. Our work is an eclectic mix that has been widely published in major magazines, newspapers, and books, and has earned numerous awards. We have published three eBook anthologies.
Larry Habegger, executive editor of the award-winning Travelers’ Tales books, spearheads the group, and in 2011, he had this to say about our group’s history, enthusiasm, and dedication:
Seven years now the core members of this group and I have been meeting to share and discuss our work. We started with straight travel essays and over time explored many genres, from memoir to humor to young-adult fiction to literary fiction. And we are exploring them still.
Townsend 11′s authors are: Jennifer Baljko, Carol Beddo, Jacqueline Collins, John Dalton, Larry Habegger, Dana Hill, Barbara Robertson, Bonnie Smetts, Jacqueline Yau, Bill Zarchy, and Y.J. Zhu.
Our books:
Our debut volume, No Fixed Destination: Eleven Stories of Life, Love, Travel, will take you down the Nile, behind the curtains of the airline industry, and through the chill of the Ethiopian rainy season. You’ll read about finding summer love and the price that comes with it, passing yourself off as your mother, trying to train a chicken, racing a motorcycle on the world’s most demanding endurance course in China’s Taklamakan Desert, and much more.
In our second book, No Set Boundaries: Eleven Stories of Life, Travel, Misadventure, you can witness a Catalan ritual in Barcelona, shop the Italian way, freeze on an English beach, deal with prejudice in Ethiopia, backpack down a frightening road in Cambodia, rest in a California garden, and glide along on a French canal. You’ll learn about a bent zucchini that’s not a vegetable, try to help lost travelers, break a leg on a mountain trail, and dash through an ancient city in India.
In our third outing, No Definite Plans: Eleven Stories of Laughter, Love, Travel, you can learn how to hold it while rafting the Amazon, have an animated dream, witness a unique spectacle in a French cathedral, visit a women’s only sanctum in Morocco, and head for home in the Midwest. You will contemplate an emperor’s curiosity, discover the unexpected aftermath of adventure, and confront the inevitability of aging. And, in our first fiction offerings, you’ll meet unforgettable characters in China and India and ponder the generation gap in modern language.
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