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We are in a small coffee and sandwich place housed in a former two-bay service station in Richmond, Virginia. Boxes of paper goods and food service supplies are piled almost to the ceiling. Everyone who has ever been here has taped a business card to the wall. They are the usual suspects: real estate agents and Reiki practitioners, computer geeks and Kundalini yoga instructors, pet sitters and psychoanalysts. They all come here.

A few years ago, my friend Vicky and I invited some Italian friends to come to the States to do a few authentic Italian cooking demonstrations. They were wildly successful, and people still talk about them.

Do Rome in small chunks. Get to Rome, stay in your (imaginary) lane and promise to come back and see something different next time. Rome will always be Rome.

With the 2007 publication of the anthology Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, interest in travel poetry has increased in writing circles. But travel poetry has, of course, been around for thousands of years. The Odyssey, Canterbury Tales and Divine Comedy can all be considered travel poetry. And sometimes your recollections and observations just naturally seem to fall more easily into a poetic form than into prose.

Where do you go? Are you drawn to big cities, wildly rural areas or something in between? Is it the hustle of a busy metropolis or a calmer, slower pace that calls to you? And (if you have any these days) what do you like to do in your spare time? Are you a museum crawler, a foodie or is it nature that brings out the best in you? And then there’s my favorite question: domestic travel or Italy? consider keeping a travel journal. Consider keeping a travel journal.

Maxine left us on February 4th at 11:30 p.m. at Angell Memorial in Jamaica Plain. She straddled both our laps and crossed over. Lots of sobbing. Massive headaches. That’s why you haven’t heard from me in a few weeks. We are still grieving the loss of our little girl and plan to be doing so for a number of months or more. We had her for 15 years and she was our only child. A very special furry child who was alternately loving and maddening, amusing and aloof, needy and indepen

When I attended the Massachusetts Poetry Festival recently, I took a class on writing poetry about food. I’m off to Italy soon. What else did you think would happen?

There have been two books in my life that brought me to tears. The first one was Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The second time was more recent, when my friend Sharon told me I should pick up a book called The Help, by a writer named Kathryn Stockett. Obviously, it’s an instant classic, beautifully written and exceedingly important. I’m often terrified of book-to-movie adaptations, but this one was good. Maybe great.

Tough words, especially for travel writers. We’re supposed to be so observant, so adept at translating our experiences and emotions into word pictures for our readers. At creating something that makes readers want to go where we’ve been, experience what we’ve experienced. A friend once called them “wordscapes.” It’s not always so easy.