The little preacher paused in the orchard to worship the beauty of the day. From the hillside where he stood the white blossoms of the apple trees drifted like snow down to the hollow where a small river eased its way through groves of willow. The sun, a great splash of molten gold, drew the...

I had known about the woman they called The Bat Lady long before I met her that Spring morning at her place by the river. She was one of those characters who seem drawn to the dusty little Texas settlements along the Rio Grande; habitat of failed prospectors, wanderers, mystics, fugitives and...

I met the poet Yi Junzi in the Yau ma Tei Typhoon Shelter off the shores of Kowloon. He had been driven from his home in Nanjng and his country by Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In those days, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, thousands upon thousands of China’s intellectuals, writers and...