The Desert Wall - Paperback

Morgan, Raf: - I've been preparing all my life to be a writer, though I didn't know it. Like that time I volunteered to protect sea turtles on a beach in Costa Rica and wound up with half my body in her nest at 3 am with a blue plastic bag under her butt to catch her eggs to relocate them so poachers couldn't find them. Or living in Bangkok, Thailand, which is where I am now for my day job. (I'm from the USA, but I've lived in Mexico, Costa Rica and Nicaragua.) You never know what's going to happen here and every day is an adventure. Once we hired a driver to take us to the beach and he removed the steering wheel from the dashboard. While we were driving! Mostly I've worked as a technical editor and a Spanish to English translator in the US, Mexico City, Lima, Moscow and Surabaya, but I've also worked as a dog walker (sometimes taking 11 dogs to the park at once, but usually only two or three), on bilingual websites in Bogotá and Montevideo, and in district court (criminal) and family court in the US as an advocate. I've been asked to interpret from Portuguese even though I don't speak Portuguese (it was an emergency) and gotten up at 4 am to edit a meeting report and ended my day at the Bolshoi Theater watching Russian ballet. My favorite things are long rambling walks, preferably under trees, but a city will do, the smell of rain and a good book. My favorite poetry anthology is Americans' Favorite Poems, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz, and don't even ask me to pick a favorite book. I have too many.