Clean Coal

New Article! Youth Travel Programs

Each summer, thousands of North American high-school students travel abroad with organizations that specialize in educational travel programs.

Where There Be Dragons

Many of these lucky students return home with increased self-confidence, a heightened understanding of global issues, fabulous photos for Facebook, and a college essay topic that will impress even the most ruthless Ivy League admissions officer.

Parents and students who decide to invest in an educational travel program should be applauded, but choosing the right program is a daunting and complicated task. Dozens of organizations specialize in youth travel, and among these organizations there are tremendous variations in travel style, educational philosophy, and overall quality.

Continue reading How To Choose A Summer Youth Travel Program

Latest Myanmar Feature

My latest feature from the undercover expedition to northern Myanmar just went live at Global Post - please give it a read!

Ethnic Kachins Defy Myanmar's Junta

To The Future

by Peter Davison

originally published in The Atlantic



I in completing
this poem
hope at least

to outlive the journey
from a notebook page
to the freedom of

one fair copy to be handed
to a friend and then
to other friends

one of whom may
see to it that
these words are

copied or left about so that
some person who knows nothing of
me who wrote them

may notice and
take the poem as a
delight or disturbance.

May it enlist or
puzzle readers enough so
that by undertaking its traffic

they may speak its language to
multiply its effect
and by voicing both
deliver me to you.

Peter Davison (1928—2004) was The Atlantic's poetry editor for thirty years.

David Miller: Bone Truth Literature

David Miller and daughter Layla

Up this morning at 5:30. My only time to read and write. Running a Roberto Bolaño story through my speed-reader program while listening to drum and bass. Both at 200 bpm. The story is about a struggling Chilean writer (Bolaño) meeting a famous writer, only in this ethereal realm. Some call it magical realism. But it’s not magic. After enough time in Latin America you realize anything is possible like villages under siege by giant pairs of wings. It’s possible here too. This is all the Americas. It’s just that up here we clean the blood on the streets and keep our elders locked away.


But say you end up falling in love with the idea of this naked land. You go down there. Meet someone. Camp with her beside a Mexican graveyard full of paper flowers. Get married under the warm rain in Buenos Aires. Your parents flying down from Atlanta, joyful and bewildered. Mariachis arriving. People crying in the rain, saying “Dios is watching.”

wedding night in Buenos Aires

And then how quickly it moves to you just working back in the US. Getting up at 5:30 because like the young Chilean writer you think most of what’s out there is shit too. And if you could just get the beats and words to match up before sunrise and the dream-feeling goes away. Not looking in a mirror but out from it. Bee, Andrea, Mom, Dad, Brother Sam, Nana. Bolaño. Everyone there. Here. Time’s up.

- from "Twitter Novel" by David Miller

Within the next 6 months, you will read about David Miller and his real-time novel in the New Yorker, in Harpers, in the Times. His work is just too damn good and groundbreaking to stay out of the spotlight for long.

David is writing a novel in real-time on twitter.com, a micro-blogging website. This is, perhaps, one way in which literature will make the transition to the digital age.

Make no mistake - David's writing is literary. It's beautiful and intimate and real and the bone-truth.

David has been a mentor to me these past two years, even though we've only met in person twice, once in Boulder, Colorado, and once in Buenos Aires, not long after his first daughter was born.

He writes about family, faith, distance and fatherhood, and he writes one line at a time.

Here's the link to David's twitter page, where you can read the novel as it is being written.

David Miller's twitter novel

You can either start at the beginning by clicking on "older posts" or just follow the flow.

Or, you can go to this link, where David transcribes the novel with minor edits:

David Miller's novel - full version

Give David some of your time, and when his novel is featured in The New Yorker, you can say you heard about him way back when.


all photos copyright David Miller.