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Anastasia M Ashman's Blog
November 23, 2009
- Mirror in Topkapı harem by A. AshmanBy ANASTASIA ASHMANSince the Ottoman royal harems were filled with women from the Mediterranean and the Baltic -- Italian families even casting their daughters on the Adriatic to be picked up by the sultan's sailors -- my Turkish husband jokes he finally brought me back to Istanbul where I belong.I don’t know, anything's possible. The Turks were also laying ...
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November 19, 2009
- I asked that question during a week of live #litchat on Twitter when I guest hosted this spring. Here are highlights from three hours of conversation with 40 readers, writers, travelers, expats, Third Culture Kids and emigrees weighing in from around the globe:WHAT'S EXPAT LIT?The interpretation of another culture by someone of our own. -- M. Dominique BenoitAn expat writer draws on a ...
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November 10, 2009
- This week I'll be speaking with creative entrepreneur Tara Agacayak on a panel about social media for the International Professional Women of Istanbul Network (IPWIN). The happy trends of Web 2.0 online networking, collaborating, and user-generated content seem tailor-made for pro women like us who often face a more difficult career path abroad. Whether "trailing spouses" lacking a ...
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October 28, 2009
- I don’t see death every day, but I hear it.From where I sit, in my home office overlooking a little Bosphorus bay, the day is punctuated by recess at a large school below. Sometimes through the din I think I hear a high-pitched pain cry echoing in the valley. An intermittent wail. Out on the balcony I listen, some primitive hackle raised. Rarely can I locate its exact source but it comes from ...
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October 20, 2009
- Blood and marriage draw families together but often whole worlds continue to separate us as individuals. Lifestyle choices. Generations. In-laws. Siblings. Achieving – and maintaining -- harmony is a challenge we all seem to face.Some clans need more help than others. Around our holiday table in 1979, my fractious relatives were gifted with a sudden ability to perceive each other as the ...
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October 17, 2009
- Expat Harem has a new global niche.The Expat Harem — a concept I coined in 2004 with Jennifer Eaton Gokmen and brought to life in 2005 and 2006 in the foreign women in Turkey anthology Tales from the Expat Harem – has always been about a modern and virtual community of cultural peers.Now the (softly) relaunched ExpatHarem.com aims to bring its community to life online as a neoculture hub ...
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October 12, 2009
- Growing up in a countercultural town, the presentation and packaging tactics of Madison Avenue and Hollywood, and the protocol of the diplomatic world seemed like subversive tools of the establishment. I often think of a brilliant local character known as a founding father of California’s rich architectural history who wandered the streets of Berkeley barefoot, his red beard and hair wild, beer ...
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October 4, 2009
- “Manners are your passport to the world,” the Gilded Age writer of American etiquette Emily Post once opined. The mid-century sage also said etiquette isn’t a strict code of socially correct behavior we need to memorize -- it’s simply how our lives touch other people. Respect.Although more a proponent of Miss Manner’s sharp-humored good sense, I’m intrigued by the premise if we ...
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September 25, 2009
- I'd been on the move for a decade when I reviewed Pico Iyer’s Tropical Classical for the Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia’s pioneering newsweekly magazine closed by its owner Dow Jones this week.…first I’d escaped the radical provincialism of my hometown by shipping off to a ruggedly urbane college; traded suburban Philly rhythms for the pulse of Manhattan; sought relief from the ...
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September 10, 2009
- The fresh perspective of an outsider-on-the-inside releases energy from all directions. What strikes us about a place — and may entice our fellow country-people – often does not resonate to the same degree with the average native.I was pleased to meet an expat woman entrepreneur on LinkedIn last week who was once a director at the American-Malaysian Chamber of Commerce. She now advises the ...
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September 2, 2009
- Expatriatism is often a life apart. So how does a writer abroad get up to speed and compete in her home market?Here's my answer in a guest post -- about the fortuitous intersection of expatriatism, epublishing and digital citizenship -- at former Writers Digest editor Maria Schneider's Editor Unleashed blog.Are you culturally or geographically challenged? How do you level the playing field
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August 11, 2009
- I’m on vacation/in post-TED Global recovery this August. Taking social networking easy as well, I posted a chocolate cake recipe on Facebook. You can whip up the quickie soufflé-like treat in a coffee mug with the help of a microwave.The indulgent little formula emailed by my Sacramento sister comes from a world I haven’t lived in for years. Microwave cooking. White sugar and vegetable oil. ...
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July 26, 2009
- Happily at home in Istanbul in 2007, I flipped through Unsuitable for Ladies. Edited by Jane Robinson, this anthology of female travel writing crisscrosses the globe and stretches back into ancient history. Complete candy for me.Around the same time I was ruminating in an essay for a global nomad magazine why I’ve come to employ a defensive strategy for my expatriatism. Sense of self is my ...
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July 8, 2009
- A longtime friend messaged me on Facebook yesterday to alert me I need to change my profile photo to a more flattering one.I snapped it in my sunny Istanbul kitchen on my iPhone last month. I’d just had my hair done — and a facial, so not a stitch of makeup. I look somewhat natural, and somewhat my age of almost 45. I liked the image for that reason. An actual unvarnished look rather than the ...
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June 25, 2009
- I'm looking forward to attending TEDGlobal in Oxford next month especially since the conference's theme is "The Substance of Things Not Seen". Invisibility, hiddenness, misapprehension -- all are threaded through my own work.Consider Expat Harem's anachronistic, titillating concept. It taps into robust yet erroneous Western stereotypes about Asia Minor and the entire Muslim ...
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