What It Is

Travels across Southeast Asia, reported from the road and filed from Manila. Dispatches on places, the people who inhabit them, and — every now and then — the objects worth carrying back.

These journeys produce a sequence of dispatches accumulating into regional arcs — the Philippines, Siam, Indochina, the Malay Archipelago.

The beat is narrow and steady: places, the people who make things in them, the objects that come out of that making. The standard for a dispatch is that it earn its word count — with history, material detail, or the person at the workbench.

No hotel reviews. No best-of listicles. No travel writing that treats a place as a backdrop.

When Dry Market ships an object, it is because a specific trip produced it. A textile, a ceramic, a small print run. The object is the dispatch's receipt.

What I Am

I've been in the Philippines long enough to stop calling it a move. 

Before that: A stretch in the U.S. Army as a cavalry scout. A few years of farming blueberries while attending the University of Florida. Time teaching in a college classroom. A digital art curation project for SIGGRAPH. An e-learning company that got built and sold. A BPO that still runs. Along the way, there was always a notebook.

I'm sixty-one, American, and traveling on a Falstafian appetite for what’s just around the bend. Dry Market runs the calculus of cost/benefit and curiosity.

The beat — places, makers, and the things that come out of the making — draws on a library of trips going back more than a decade, alongside whatever bus I'm on this month. Some dispatches come out of the current trip. Some come out of a journey taken years ago that has finally found its frame. 

Stay Tuned In

The dispatches go out as a newsletter. No schedule, no filler — they arrive when they do. Subscribers get them in the inbox, first word on any object that ships, and a reliable read on Southeast Asia from boots on the ground.