Through her wanderings on five continents, this week’s Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 contributor has learned to shear sheep, cultivate rice, sail without a G.P.S., and 
edit a state-run newspaper with a straight face: Christine Buckley. Her LA Weekly cover story on human rights activist Aaron Cohen was a 2008 LA Press Club and Maggie Award finalist and led to the book Slave Hunter: One Man’s Quest to Free Victims of Human Trafficking, co-written with Cohen (Simon & Schuster Entertainment). Born in New York and currently based in Paris, Christine is working on a second book.
What is “home” for you? Is it a particular place or person or thing?
Before I really started traveling, “home” was synonymous with New York…and in a way, it will always be. If you give that city all you’ve got, it gives you back twice as much. And until I was in my mid-twenties, it was the only way of life I’d known. I was happy there. But at some point in 1999 I realized I needed to experience something totally different before I got too comfortable. New York attracts so many talented people who’ve had to fight their way there, and there I was, just hanging out by default. So settling there before having tried another way of life would have seemed like a cop-out, somehow. Since then I’ve made my home in several other countries—in rural villages, small towns and big cities. Read the rest of this entry »
