At the Bend of the Road
Guernica Magazine, July 2021
Selected for Best American Essays 2022
“The flyers are pasted to dusty window panes in roadside cafés, stapled to skinny utility poles along fields, pinned on the overloaded cork boards of pilgrim hostels. It is July, 2015. Three months ago, along the Camino de Santiago, a Christian pilgrimage trail through Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal that is increasingly popular with secular walkers and international travelers, a woman disappeared. Her name is Denise Thiem. She is a forty-one-year-old Asian American woman from Arizona.”
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