Valerie Miner

Bio.

I don't know whether I am first a writer or a traveler, but I became interested in exploring and storytelling early in my childhood. In the kitchen, I listened to my mother's memories of her native Edinburgh, window-shopping along Princes Street, errands to the corner shop to buy chipped fruit and The News of the World. Out in our back garden, I sat on the lawn while my seaman father tied up his beef steak tomatoes, drank iced tea and described the brilliant fabrics he had seen in Argentina and the tasty seaweed he had eaten in Japan.

During the many months he was on the ocean, I awaited his return, eager for more stories and especially eager for the new doll he would bring dressed in a local fashion. Those dolls from Korea and Japan and Holland and Jamaica and the Dominican Republic now sit together on my bookcase. Just as I always knew each one had a distinct personality, I knew this personality was related to her place of origin.

As an adult I lived abroad for ten years in England, Australia, India, Canada and other countries and traveled widely in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Now I faced ethical and moral and spiritual questions about the differences between visiting and trespassing, describing and appropriating.

Such travelling made coming "home" that much more fascinating because I now knew other places (settings) to which I compared familiar food and voices and climate. Home became something smaller and larger and far more complicated than the place I left. And I was never able to think about home again without seeing it on a map - in context. Home wasn't the center of the world anymore, but it was finally in the world.