interview by Dara Syrkin

“I have something good to tell you,” says Bernice Koehler Johnson. “We need to focus on the good things.”

Bernice has taught English as a foreign language in Thailand to Shan refugees forced to flee from their homeland in Burma. Their homes are burned, their rice fields confiscated, their children abused. The Shan flee to Thailand, where they are unwanted and, if they can find employment, work at the most difficult, lowest-paying jobs—toting heavy loads of bricks or spraying pesticides on crops for ten hours a day, six days a week.

by Dara Syrkin

Educators, travel writer and chef, business writer, business owner. What do they have in common? Writing.

B. J. Carpenter, Maggie DeGennaro, Sherry Derus, Elsa Hofmeister, Mary Henrickson, and Elaine Voboril met in one of Mary Jean Port’s memoir classes and formed a writing group in 2002.