We are, every single one of us, born into a story. A simple plot from a collection of stories that link a community. From birth to high school graduation (exposition, rising action), and from your wedding to a first house (climax, falling action), a narrative of expectation—your class position, college and career, even how long you will live—has already been imagined, mapped onto your body and your bones. (denouement).

This is not to say that we are powerless. We can break norms, travel, start a band, become an influencer. We can buy our friends a round, sit in a bar, and perfect the story we’ve told a thousand times (and they’ll laugh at the right parts, like good friends should), and we can create beautiful moments of memory and meaning-making. But the shape of destiny has already been sketched onto our futures. In many ways, we are simply filling in the details.

I was, personally, fine with this. I had moved away from home for college and my early 20s, but I was happy to come back. I bought a townhouse around five minutes from the house I grew up in. I shopped at the same grocery store my mother and I had when I was a kid. Went to the same parks, drove by the same churches. This isn’t to say that the city hadn’t changed. The Nashville of my 1990s childhood was definitely different from the Nashville of the 2010s and early 2020s. But as a queer woman who has never really felt like I fit, the connections to the past were a source of comfort in a confusing world. I felt grounded.

I had a job I loved, a queer community that felt like family. My wife and I belonged to an affirming church. We were trying to have a baby who would have been a ninth generation Nashvillian.

But then, we got “the call,” and knew, soon, we were going to have to leave. Our story fell apart. It could no longer follow the simple plot. Instead, we needed to walk a different path. Little did we know, we had just started our “Immigrant Journey.”

Inspired by “The Hero’s Journey,” “The Immigrant Journey” also starts with home, with the familiar. If The Hero’s Journey starts in District 12, The Shire, Tatooine, then The Immigrant’s Journey starts in your home town. Home might not be comfortable, but it’s what you know. You know the shape of life there. And then something happens. Something brings you out of your home and into the unknown. This is the beginning of the journey.

For an immigrant, this “call” can be thought of as the moment that you decide you need to leave: a piece of legislation passed, a chronic illness diagnosis, violence in your neighborhood, or simply an unshakeable knowing that home cannot give you what you need, cannot provide you with the life that you seek.

For us, it was the overturn of Roe. Because a nation that limits the choices of women limits itself. I did not want to live in such a society.

But like any good Hero, I couldn’t accept that we had to leave. I refused the call. Logic and emotion were battling it out, and I stayed in denial for a long time. We continued fertility treatments, talked about planting fruit trees in the back of our yard. We kept imagining what the details of our life would look like. We were not yet ready to accept that the life we had been promised was no longer available to us.

And then, they began passing legislation to limit gender affirming care in the state of Tennessee. This is when we decided to seek the aid of an expert.

You see, immigrants defy the story we’re given. Whether chosen or forced to immigrate, or a combination of the two, immigration is an act of agency, a declaration that your story will follow a different narrative. You can leave with a certainty that there are previously unassumed futures out there waiting for you to arrive in them.

We took a visit to Montevideo, Uruguay (a country we suspected we could build a life in) and met there with a residency specialist. For others, this might be a lawyer or a relocation firm. In the Hero’s Journey, this is known as a mentor (think: Virgil guiding Dante through Hell).

Then, we cross into the unknown, otherwise known as a border. And then, everything changes. There’s some good here: some new food, both the gentle and abrupt ways a new culture asserts itself. And some paperwork. And some more paperwork. There’s language teachers and trying to learn how to pay your bills and a loneliness so deep that you think you’ll never get out of it. Then, the immigrant reaches her “ordeal.”

For me, this was our first winter. We had few friends, my language learning was going slowly, and because of the isolation, my wife and I were fighting a lot. Every day I missed home and wanted to return. My nephew was born and I wouldn’t get to meet him for over a year. I bargained, I cried, I got angry. I grieved. And ultimately, I, like others who call themselves immigrants, decided to stay.

But I can tell you I didn’t feel much like a hero. Was I brave? At times. Though my bravery looked less like saving my district or the world or even just the rebellion. It looked more like making sure I got out of bed and dressed every day. Bravery, for an immigrant, looks less like a journey through Hell and more like braving the meat counter at the grocery store. It looks like showing up to your court dates, not knowing how the judge is going to rule. It looks like putting your future into the hands of faceless bureaucracy and not being sure if it will extend you welcome.

But ultimately, we prevail. We get the residency card, and with it, a sense of belonging. We get the Duolingo streak and learn the social niceties. We change the way we approach the world. Our identities are challenged and we watch them shift.

We return from the unknown back to the known, not because we went back home, but because we integrated our new way of being into our sense of self. We found our home, new and hungry for different stories.

This is a story unlike the one we were expected to tell. So when I say immigrants make the best writers, I mean that we changed our stars. We see the world with eyes that have been taught a new understanding. And when we write, we learn that we cannot rely on the old adages, the old cliches. We must invent. Our lives demand it.

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Author’s Note

I started writing this piece as a way to talk about Unbordered Editorial, an offshoot of Unbordered Magazine, inspired by my own writing journey after becoming an immigrant. Somewhere along the way, the essay became something more personal than I planned, but the impulse behind both is the same. We believe that people who have had to rebuild their lives from scratch have something particular to offer as writers, and we want to help those voices be heard.

If you’re in the process of writing your own story, Unbordered Editorial can help. Our team is made up of people who know what it means to give everything up and find a new story elsewhere.

We’re also currently accepting submissions for issues 05 and 06 of our magazine, themed “thresholds” and “seasons.” We publish commentary, essays, poetry, and art, and you can find submission details here.

And if you’re still in the thick of your own version of the ordeal, consider following along. We tell the stories of people who are going through it, the same as you.

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Amber Stewart is a writer, editor, and founder of Unbordered Magazine, a literary publication documenting the stories of Americans living outside the United States. She lives in Montevideo, Uruguay with her wife, Jamie, and their dog, Libby. Amber is the author of In the Garden: An Almanac for Uprooting.

Unrecognizable

Maybe your death turned me into
something I wasn’t before.

My shadow grew darker than
the one I donned as a girl.

Dad, you lost your father too—
why didn’t you warn me that

I’d have to grieve myself after you?
It’s not just that I had to change,

perhaps part of me wanted this too.
Now, I speak a different language

in the home I built across the world.
Dad, I know you’d be disgusted

by some of the things I’ve done.
I can almost hear you shouting

from the heavens, telling all
the worst guys I’ve dated to scram.

Dad, I’ve been feeling like
the worst kind of daughter.

Maybe I should’ve held on tighter
to the last fragments of her.

But eventually one of us had to die
and it wasn’t going to be me. 

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The Picture Looks the Same

We used to say our family portrait
was a puzzle with one missing piece.

Now, they’ve rearranged themselves
to be whole again without me

and the picture still looks the same. 

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Hannah Dilday (she/her) is an emerging American writer currently residing in the Netherlands. Prior to relocating abroad in 2020, Hannah earned her BS in philosophy from The University of Oregon. Hannah’s writing has recently appeared in Divinations Magazine, Moonflake Press, and Haunted Words Press, among others. When Hannah is not writing poetry, she enjoys photography, traveling, and practicing Dutch. Additionally, Hannah serves as an Editor at Forevermore.

A Note From the Editors

We don’t typically publish fiction. But “The Witness” felt like an exception worth making.

The piece imagines a future in which the people who left the United States become its historians, the ones who watched from outside and lived to tell what they saw. It’s speculative, but it speaks directly to conversations we’ve been having with contributors and readers alike about what it means to witness a place from beyond its borders.

We’re running it because it asks a question our nonfiction pieces have been circling for a while: what do you owe a country you’ve left?

And it came to pass that in those early years of the ‘20s, the people of the land of the free were restless, and the children of the old country turned their faces toward the horizon. Many packed only what they could carry in trembling hands, leaving behind the homes they had built with hope and fear alike.

The cities strained under the weight of occupation, for they did not know who would triumph in the struggle between the governed and the governors. The streets, the trees, the quiet corners of homes once filled with laughter, now overrun with unmarked vans and masked men. The people spoke little, for words seemed heavy with the weight of what they lived in, brave souls suited up in frog costumes to stand against tyranny.

Yet some carried songs, small prayers pressed to the chest, and some chose to flee over borders and rivers, across deserts and mountains, into lands whose names they did not know well, seeking only the chance to breathe freely, to keep their children whole.

Future generations will read of these days, and they shall know that those who left, bore witness to a time of trembling and choosing, when the earth they were born on seemed to hold its breath, waiting to see who would remain, and who would go. There were many that could not leave and so they are Stayers. We the Watchers, the ones who left, yet watch from distant lands. Carried the memory of choice, of courage, and of what might yet be.

We watched and hoped to bear witness to the Stayers, grieving for the loved ones that we had left behind. Grieving for the communities that we built, watching as the tyrants broke down their doors and zip tied their children naked in the streets. Watched as the land we had been taught was our birthright was stripped of its freedoms one by one. The Strongman of Mirrors paved over the roses, mocked those who came before him, and tore down the people’s house to rebuild it in his own image.

The Stayers remained not out of hope, but out of obligation. To honor the dead, to the land, to one another. When the laws were rewritten and the names erased, they became the memory itself. They learned how to endure quietly, how to pass truth hand to hand. Long after the Strongman of Mirrors vanished into his own reflection, the Stayers were still there, tending what could not be replaced. Some stayed not by choice, but by cost. Leaving demanded money, papers, strength, and a future unencumbered by the care for others. Many had none of these. They remained because survival was cheaper than escape. And yet they kept the land, sharing what could not be seized, remembering what could not be erased, honoring the blood of the people when the state would not.

Let the record show: their endurance was not lesser for being unpaid.

It was told that some of the Stayers in the occupied cities built barricades of books, of chairs, of their own bodies, and they held what they could. And some fell, and some vanished into the night, and the earth remembered them all. And those of us who fled carried these stories in their hearts, that no one might forget.

There were many who left. Among them was a woman, named Maria, who took her children in the night. She pressed a photograph of her father to her chest, whispering blessings over his face still slumbering under his red hat. She drove past the barricades and the soldiers, her heart a drum in the silence of the streets. She did not look back, though her eyes ached to remember the home she had known.

And there was a man, called Eli, who carried his beloved satchel of books, pages worn and corners frayed. A man of science for years he was suddenly named suspect among his own brothers. He murmured the words aloud, as if they might shield him from the chaos behind him. “We are leaving,” he said, though none answered. And the roads before him were empty, yet alive with the echoes of footsteps that had gone before.

And there was a trans woman whose name we will not record here, because names had already been used against her. She left because staying had become a sentence. Laws had learned her outline. She packed what could be carried and memorized what could not, knowing that visibility had turned from promise to threat. She crossed borders with her shoulders squared, her papers correct, her fear disciplined. History would later argue about politics; her body had already rendered its verdict. If she is remembered without a name, let it be known this was an act of care, not forgetting.

Many others walked in their footsteps, each burdened with memory and hope. They crossed rivers swollen with sorrow, they crossed oceans with long airline journeys that tested their will. And in the lands they reached, unknown and strange, they whispered prayers for mercy and mercy came not swiftly, but it came in small, stubborn ways.

And the Watchers recorded their journey, for it was a testimony to what had been. They spoke of hunger and of laughter, of fear and of courage intertwined. And they wrote of the nights when the sky was a canopy of stars, and the wind carried the scent of home across the distance, across borders, across the oceans of years.

And it came to be that the children of the exodus learned the names of strangers as kin, and the taste of bread baked in unknown ovens became their sustenance. They learned that courage is not a roaring fire, but a quiet pulse that persists even when everyone around you speaks in a foreign tongue.

They grew like cuttings placed in unfamiliar soil, slow at first, then certain. What they lost was real, and what they gained was not a replacement but a widening. They carried both forward. These children who grew up in places their parents had once only pointed to on maps. They learned new alphabets, new songs for the same games, new ways of belonging that arrived before understanding. They missed what had been taken from them, the friends whose names now lived only in memory, the houses they could no longer describe without stumbling. And yet they thrived. They went to school without rehearsing where to hide, without learning the geometry of terror before multiplication. They spoke freely, dreamed broadly, and imagined futures unshadowed by the tyranny their leaving had outrun. If they carried grief, it was not a wound that stopped them, but a weight they learned to balance as they grew.

The years will speak of these things as shadows and light, as memory and witness, and they will understand that leaving was not cowardice, but a claim to life, to choose to breathe. And the chronicles of the future shall hold these stories, written in the ink of sorrow and hope.

As it has been written: They left because the land had become heavy, because the walls of law and fear pressed too close. They left to live, to protect, to bear witness. And in their leaving, they carried a light for the generations yet unborn, so that none might forget the tremor of those days, nor the courage it demanded.

And so we remember. And so we write. And so, with every word, their exodus endures.

This record, sealed in the year 2157, so that our history endures.

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SN Corvin is a writer of fantasy and contemporary fiction, exploring themes of myth, family, queer stories and transformation. She is currently completing her debut novella, Unholy Liturgy. Now living in Uruguay, Corvin, when she isn’t writing, is most likely to be found raising 4 kids, gardening, studying fungi, rewatching Schitt’s Creek (starting at the David/Patrick arch) or plotting the next story no one asked for.

What nobody tells you when you leave your homeland for a new horizon is that you relinquish the right to your first self. It is a permanent, bittersweet truth—one we discover in small pieces along the way.

I first realized I was fractured during a visit back home. Holding a takeaway cup of Starbucks while walking through the mall, I caught my reflection in an American Eagle store window and wondered, When was the last time I did this? In France, we don’t amble with coffee. We sit with coffee. We chat with coffee. We connect at a table with friends over coffee. This coffee didn’t taste the same served in a paper cup—it felt rushed, it felt sterile.

That was the beginning. My fifteen years in France chipped away at my old identity piece by piece, yet I never became entirely French. At my core, a part of me will always be that Midwestern girl from Missouri—the one who smiles openly at strangers, leaving cashiers in France wondering, Why is she smiling at me? Do I know her?

Certain pieces never fade. They are deeply ingrained by your upbringing, your childhood landscape, and the shared cultural rhythms of your youth. Because of that stubbornly beautiful part of myself, I could sit at a six-hour dinner with French friends, understanding every word spoken, yet still miss the subtle cultural references or ancestral jokes. I would leave the table full, but quieted by a subtle loneliness.

When I left France, I carried a piece of it with me, only to be transformed again in Costa Rica. Here, the land is reshaping me once more. I am no longer simply split between American and French; I am a mosaic pieced together by three years of living alongside Costa Rica’s lush nature and vibrant culture.

I have learned the song the yigüirro sings before the rain. I have found beauty in the quiet stillness of the September ocean. I’ve felt the rush of watching clouds part just enough to reveal the river valleys below, and felt my heart swell on a simple walk with my dog, rain or shine. I have discovered the beauty of a simpler life, and I will never be the same.

If I ever return to my homeland, I know I will never completely fit back into the old mold. And here, no fellow traveler will ever carry this exact same tapestry of places. I am fractured, and yes, sometimes lonely because of it. But I love every incredible, bittersweet piece of this journey—and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Summer Riffaud is a multi-country immigrant. First to France where her husband is a national, and lastly to Costa Rica. Her brain is full of languages and pieces of culture that she’s constantly piecing together.

Issue 04: Reinvention is now live on our website in digital flipbook format, offering a more visual, intentional way to experience the magazine as a whole.

If you’d prefer to read more gradually, you can also subscribe here to receive weekly featured pieces from the issue, shared over the coming weeks as part of our newsletter.

Subscribe now

From the Editor’s Desk

A few weeks ago, I made a TikTok video talking about some of the difficulties people encounter when moving abroad. In it, I mention that, “You will need to redefine almost everything about yourself–what you like, who you are, what your values are.” Someone commented “What do you mean you have to redefine what you like and who you are?” I never responded because I wanted to take a beat. What did I mean?

Now that I’ve had a little bit of time to think about it, I think any time our context changes, we are not only encouraged to reevaluate our understanding of ourselves, but we are almost forced to. Think about it–if you were raised in a world where everything is blue, you would wear blue. You would speak blue. You would put things in a hierarchy based on how blue they were. But what happens when you are dropped into a world that is green? You could continue to remain the same, but it might be difficult to make green-world friends or build green-world tastes. Can you learn to speak the language of green when your mind still conceives of everything in blue?

Let’s bring these questions into the real world: What foods do you like to cook when the spices you used to depend on aren’t available? Does your sense of gender change in a place where men kiss each other as a greeting? Do you still pray for healing in a place with universal healthcare?

When we chose the theme of “Reinvention” for this issue, we were thinking about it in two ways. The first was the sort of fresh start that can only come with uprooting everything you’ve ever known and starting from scratch. You get to ask yourself a question most people never will: who do I want to be in this new life? But for the second, we were thinking of the longer, more hidden process of reinventing yourself because the world around you changed. And we have no choice but to evolve, for better or worse.

So in this issue, SN Corvin writes from a possible future the story of the “Watchers,” and their (our?) role in remembering, Hannah Dilday writes poems about her changing relationship to grief, and Antonia Peplinski writes about how her marriage continues to evolve in light of her immigration. Emily Austen writes about her queer awakening, and Summer Riffaud reminds us we are an amalgamation of our experiences.

And, of course, our artists help us see the world differently, as artists tend to do. Kenneth Kesner gives us a peek at Western Asia and Rachel Mims shows us how to get to know our new environment through urban sketching.

I hope this issue delivers a sense of camaraderie for this strange space we each find ourselves in. And I look forward to meeting you all where you are while we grow together in community.

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Amber Stewart is a writer, editor, and founder of Unbordered Magazine, a literary publication documenting the stories of Americans living outside the United States. She lives in Montevideo, Uruguay with her wife, Jamie, and their dog, Libby. Amber is the author of In the Garden: An Almanac for Uprooting.

Coming soon: Issue 04 of Unbordered is coming out on August 3rd, and we can’t wait for you to read it! But in the meantime, we want to share some prompts for our next two issues of the magazine. If you’re an American living abroad, the the staff of Unbordered invites you to submit to Issues 05 and 06.

Issue 05: Thresholds (Deadline: October 1, 2026)

A threshold is an in-between place, a place where you don’t know what awaits you on the other side. It’s the moment before the door opens and the last look back at your loved ones before getting on the plane. Issue 05 invites essays, nonfiction, poetry, and art that sit with these in-between moments. Tell us what you carried across and what you’re leaving behind.

Not sure where to start? Try one of these:

• Write about the last ordinary moment

• Describe a word or phrase you can only say in one language and what is missing in translation.

• Make a piece of art about something you carried with you that you didn’t expect to need.

Issue 06: Seasons (Deadline: January 31, 2027)

Time moves differently when you leave. Summer no longer smells the same. You find yourself grieving October and the way it felt on your skin. Holiday celebrations are upside down, the climate all wrong in a new hemisphere. But over time, with enough turns of the Earth around the sun, you begin to build new associations. You begin to redefine what a season means to you. For Issue 06, Unbordered is looking for essays, nonfiction, poetry, and art that explore both the literal and figurative seasons of a life lived abroad.

Not sure where to start? Try one of these:

• Choose one of the four seasons. What comes to mind when you think of it? Is that how you experience it now? Where are the differences? The pain points?

• Describe a holiday or seasonal tradition you tried to keep alive abroad, and what happened to it.

• What season were you in emotionally when you left — and what season are you in now?

For submission guidelines, word counts, and formats, visit our submissions page.

We’re so grateful for this community, and we can’t wait to read what you send us!

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One of the things I hear most from Unbordered’s writers is that they’re working on something bigger: a memoir, a poetry collection, a book that’s been living in their head for years. For a while, I didn’t have anything concrete to offer beyond encouragement. But publishing my own book this year changed how I think about what Unbordered can be — and what it can offer this community.

This year, I published my own debut memoir-in-essays, In the Garden: An Almanac for Uprooting, a book about leaving Nashville, becoming an immigrant in Montevideo, and what it means to plant a life in unexpected soil. Getting that book from idea to finished, distributed, reviewed, and in readers’ hands taught me more about the publishing process than anything else could have. And it confirmed something I’d been thinking about for a while:

The writers in this community deserve an editorial partner who gets it, who understands not just the craft of writing, but the specific weight of the stories we carry as emigrants.

So we’re building one.

Introducing Unbordered Editorial - the literary services arm of Unbordered Press.

Unbordered Editorial offers developmental editing, writing coaching, cover design, website design, and social media support for writers working in nonfiction, memoir, and personal essay. We specialize in supporting queer writers, emigrant writers, and writers navigating questions of identity, displacement, and belonging, but we welcome any writer whose story doesn’t fit neatly into a box.

Developmental Editing - A full manuscript assessment delivered via tracked changes, plus a 60-minute follow-up call and a 30-minute check-in 30 days later to support your revision process. Available for all nonfiction genres up to 80,000 words. Pricing from $800.

Writing Coaching - Weekly one-hour sessions focused on wherever you are in your process. You bring the questions, the stuck places, the fears. We work through them together. $250/month, 3-month minimum commitment.

Cover Design - Whether you have a vision for your cover or are starting from scratch, our designer will work with you to create something that connects your work with the readers it’s meant for. From initial consultation through weekly check-ins and design refinement, you’ll be part of the process every step of the way, from first idea to final delivery. Pricing from $600.

Website Design — Your book deserves a home on the internet that feels as intentional as the work itself. Whether you’re launching a debut or building a long-term platform, our web designer works with authors and creative entrepreneurs to build everything from simple landing pages to full multi-page sites — including branding, media kits, and online presence setup. Pricing from $555.

Social Media Support — Showing up consistently on social media is one of the hardest parts of building a platform as a writer. Our social media support services take the guesswork out of it, with done-for-you graphics, captions, and strategic support so you can stay visible without burning out. Pricing from $250/month.

If you’ve been sitting on a manuscript, circling a project, or just wishing you had someone in your corner who gets it, we’d love to hear from you.

Reach out at admin@unborderedmag.com with a brief description of your project and what kind of support you’re looking for. If you’re not sure, that’s ok! We can figure it out together.

And if you know a writer who needs this, please share this post with them. The whole point of building Unbordered has always been community. A rising tide lifts all boats.

With love from Montevideo,

Amber Stewart
Founder of Unbordered 

For more information about Unbordered Editorial Services, check out our website.

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Season Finale

Everyone’s afraid right now, and you’re
the one
leaving all of this behind,
my therapist is telling me as I sob on our
weekly zoom session and tell her
everyone seems to hate us now. It’s a thing
people do, when you tell them you’re
leaving, they leave you first,
they take the door you’ve cracked
open and slam it shut. I know you’re
standing there, knocking still,
screaming to them that you’re still here,
please, we have phones, we have planes,
we have years, we have days,
but they’ve slammed it shut, you
understand, so they can sit alone
behind the door, staring deeply into
a scratched-out mirror, ignoring your pleas
because you made it all real when it’s
not, it’s not real, any of this, there’s no
reason for you to leave, because nothing
bad is happening to you, none of this
affects anyone, the news is just
approaching the season finale,
and all of the good people will conquer
evil, like they always do, just sit
down and wait, you’ll see.
You’re overreacting.

Everyone’s just acting.

If you really leave, that means —

that           mean’s                 it’s —

that

                  means —

                                               it’s —

On Read

My words have left me on the wind. 
You ask me how I am doing  
after leaving the United States, 

But I have left you again on read, 
forgetting about hot dogs, 
my regular order from Target. 

I go to the right now to get 
in the car, I stop telling 
my children to put 

on their shoes. I have 
no right to ask about 
your daily fear, now, 

and I don’t know how to tell you 
about the breeze stirring my hair 
as I pull the tea towels from the line 

the walks to the coast from 
my new home, sun stinging 
arms and legs and eyes 

and the blessed cold 
of the sea, salt on my lips, 
waves rolling my hips 

saffron threads of Pohutukawa 
tumbling in the streets, 
and I collect them and twist 

each of them through the eye 
of a needle, delicate, 
sharp like the cry of the tūī 

in the cold of the morning 
and I stitch my fingers back 
together with my fingers — 

carefully, with mistakes, 
with unraveling and raveling 
and swallowed screams, and they 

shake, my hands, 
but they are crusted with scabs, 
volcanic stones for my skin. 

I have cancelled 
the New York Times. 

I still grieve for you, 
for us, but I am a mother, 

and I hold my guilt 
close to my gut 

as it has changed 
to nourishing foods, 

to rainwater, 
to pointed fingers, 

to effigies 
in the yard, 

to targets 
on my back. 

I have hardened 
both of my eyes, 

you understand, 
obsidian dreams, 

and when I close 
them, if it is quiet, 

I still see stars. 
What can I say 

to you, my friend, 
when all is quiet, 

the tide is out, 

and I am mile 

after mile 

of black 

sand, 

muddy, 

desperately 

waiting,

dreaming 

of who I once was 

under the moon 

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Cecily Stone is a mother, writer, computer nerd, American immigrant in New Zealand, and author of These Chasms in the Earth. Her works have appeared in Welcoming The Muse (Twenty Bellows), Poems in Praise of Libraries (World Stage Press), Gypsophila Literary Magazine, Retrograde Review, Canvas Creative Arts Magazine (Indiana University), and on a set of compost liners. Stone shares her stories of motherhood, sacrifice, and rebirth at open mics and on socials: @cecilystonespeaks. On the weekends, you can usually find her alongside her husband and children finding adventure in her new home country.

“I just feel at home here, it’s amazing. My grandmother was famous for her chicken parm recipe, we’re Italian you know,” boasted Phil… Fred? Frank. Definitely probably Frank. The rest of the group nodded in friendly acceptance.

A bead of sweat crept slowly down my forehead, but it didn’t distract me from reciting the difference between ice cream and gelato, with a smile, as I had 62,349 times that Roman summer. Overtourism meant two full food tour groups a day, guaranteed. And each one concluded with the shameful admission that they, too, had fallen prey to big chain gelato. They vowed to explore Italy ethically henceforth and I forced a smile at their kind intention. Perhaps I was saving local businesses, one scoop at a time. It was something both I and my clients could feel good about.

Lots of people choose to explore the world in hopes of an illuminating experience that leads to self-discovery. Italy, my home of the past twenty years, welcomes many such pilgrims. Some are tourists, some are heritage seekers, and some are more permanent transplants. Years of working as a tour guide and a teacher have led me to the conclusion that people generally do the best they can with the tools they have. We all want to be good guests. What Frank, and most people for that matter, didn’t realize was that, while buying a sweet treat at a family run business and perhaps venturing beyond the ransacked capitals of Italy were steps in the right direction, the “ethical exploration” they spoke of has less to do with overtourism than the underexamination of what we expect to find, and who we expect to be.

See, I didn’t tell Fletcher at the time, but chicken parm is not a native dish to Italy. In the past, I had gently suggested that Nonna had simply invented Italian-American cuisine, cool right? Wrong. This nearly always ended uncomfortably, either with an aggressive refusal to hear of it, or silence, and I don’t know which one was worse. I always felt as though I had, at best, ruined their vacation, and at worst, given them an existential crisis. When reality contradicted expectation, to my surprise, the expectation was defended. Exploration gave way to selective openness, a willingness to entertain difference only if it remained palatable. Authenticity is welcomed only if the fantasy is performed back.

On social media, “authenticity” within the travel niche has become a buzzword, but once the phones power down, we accept only the kind that flatters us. The immersion we thought would resolve the language barrier sounds great, but only if we can remain comfortably ourselves. We travel to be transformed, but not unsettled. And when a place refuses to act out the imagined version we’ve rehearsed, we label it disappointing and overrated.

The irony is that the more tightly we cling to our dream world, the more we help reshape the real place around it away from the authenticity we claim to seek. Businesses learn to bend towards our vision in order to survive. Those that don’t, vanish. Restaurants open earlier and include items on the menu not previously considered. Traditions are cartoonified. Neighborhoods reorient toward the visitor’s expectations. You might call it good business, and perhaps it is. Rarely do we admit it is also erasure.

Overtourism is not just a logistical or environmental failure, it is the external consequence of an internal refusal: the refusal to be changed, unsettled, or disappointed. I thought back to Fabian. I used to think my role was to correct misconceptions, to gently educate, to widen perspective and advocate for ethical choices. I still believe that matters. Over time, though, watching tourists unknowingly cling to their imaginary Italy forced me to confront the scary possibility that I was no different. I resisted the notion that this could possibly be true. I lived here, after all, and worked here. I spoke the language. Heck, I could tell you the trash collection schedule. Surely, I was more open and flexible.

Then again, we’re all guilty of adjusting the narrative to suit our ego. Who hasn’t edited a story in real time, cropping out the inconvenient details and retelling the memory in a way that bolsters the self we prefer? The version of myself I preferred was authoritative, seasoned, and fluent in the life I had built. Somewhere along the way, though, the line between gently correcting those pesky misconceptions and quietly lecturing otherwise curious people had blurred. It wasn’t that I believed I knew everything, it was that repetition had begun to feel like mastery. A life my clients regarded as luminous had, through familiarity, grown ordinary, and I had grown ungrateful. And I wasn’t ready to admit that, least of all to myself. Control can look like confidence from the outside. From within, it feels more like distance. This very mentality was what I had been warning amateur visitors against. You stand in the square you’ve already seen a hundred times online, reproduce the image, and still feel outside of it. Expectation turns experience into performance and somewhere between my 62,348th and 62,349th performance, I realized that Frank and I were not so different after all. I was only doing it in reverse.

After so many tours, I could practically lip sync what would come out of his mouth, and yet, I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t even remember the poor man’s name. Any natural curiosity and wonder had tip-toed out the back, somehow, yet keeping these characteristics alive had been one of the goals of moving abroad in the first place. “Frank” may be the tourist, but that doesn’t excuse the rest of us from carrying a quiet, curious, and unguarded posture of exploration, even into the most ordinary corners of our own days. It’s hard to let what is actually there meet us because it requires daily mindfulness and practice. It’s a decision we have to actively make. Ultimately, it’s up to you, the journey continues either way. The difference is whether we meet it resisting or receptive.

Ethical exploration, I began to understand, is not just about how we move through other people’s landscapes. It is about how honestly we move through our own. To explore ethically means releasing the demand that experience exists to fulfill us. It means observing before narrating and allowing disappointment to refine us rather than disqualify what we encounter. It requires admitting that we may not become who we imagined simply because we crossed a border, and it’s not the border’s responsibility anyways.

If I could ask travelers to let Italy be what it is, messy, layered, sometimes inconvenient, could I not ask the same of myself? Of each other? Is chicken parm not still delicious? Moving abroad never promised to change any of us. It only offered space. What I decide to do with that space, to defend myself within it or surrender to it, continues to be the real measure of what I’m willing to explore.

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Sarah Bolen is a writer and educator with a passion for curiosity-led learning. After two decades of living abroad, she writes about language, identity, and how we can make the world a better place when we reconnect with the process of learning.

This week we’re featuring the work of Gerrit Vooren, an artist who has made the journey of emigration twice: first from Holland to the United States, where he built a career as a dancer and actor, and then to Costa Rica in 2019. It’s in Costa Rica that he found the jícaro gourd, and with it, a practice rooted in stillness, attention, and the willingness to not know. In his own words:

My practice begins with not knowing. I come to each jícaro gourd without a plan—no preliminary sketch, no decided palette, no destination. I sit with it first. I look. Something in the particular swell of one side, or the way the stem meets the body, will eventually suggest a direction, and I follow. My intention is to follow the moment, to accept “mistakes” as a necessary part of both the process and the final design.

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Garrit Vooren is an immigrant twice over--first from Holland to the U.S. in his youth as a dancer and actor and then to Costa Rica in 2019.

I am proud to say that, as of yesterday, my book In the Garden: An Almanac for Uprooting is officially launched! You can find the ebook wherever ebooks are sold, and you can find the paperback version here.

For those of you who don’t know me–Hi! I’m Amber Stewart! I’m the founder and poetry editor for Unbordered Magazine, a magazine for Americans who have left the United States and are living abroad. I use the language “left,” because while there will always be a small group of Americans that choose to live outside the U.S., what we’re seeing right now is a cultural shift in what it means to be an American abroad. More and more Americans are leaving, not just because they want to have an adventure, but because their livelihoods, their safety, and their futures depend on it. For many Americans living abroad, they now have more in common with other immigrants worldwide than the romantic expat that lives in the hearts of artists and travelers.

This magazine is dedicated to exploring these changing definitions by sharing the stories, the art, and the poetry of American emigrants. The stories are different, but a lot of the sentiment is the same. Feeling fed-up. Feeling afraid. Feeling defeated or broken by a system that centers profits over people.

I started this magazine because I wanted our stories to be remembered. And I wrote my book because I wanted to show people what it looked like to be in the thick of it. I wanted to tell people what it costs when your life becomes the talking point used to divide the country. I wanted to show what it costs to uproot your life and plant it somewhere else. And I’m not just talking about money.

And then, ultimately, I wanted this book to show that it is possible to leave. That, despite the hardship and the pain, there is something worth reaching for on the other side. I don’t mean to say I’ve got it all figured out–I definitely don’t! But I have begun to glimpse what is possible when you take your fate in your own hands.

Buy "In the Garden"

I hope you’ll consider giving In the Garden a read. It’s a document and a testament to hard decisions and not backing down, to choosing the path that lets you be the fullest, most authentic person you can be. To choosing love.

Early readers have been very generous with their reflections. Here’s what just a few had to say:

“This is writing that earns its beauty honestly. Like the best spiritual autobiography, it refuses the comfort of resolution. Instead, it offers something rarer: the record of a self, a life, a country, being unmade and then slowly, tenderly, made anew.” — Adrian Shirk, author of Heaven is a Place on Earth

“Beautifully captures the heartbreak when home is no longer home. Amber reminds us how to heal as she opens up to the gentle promise of a new culture, learning to live life tranquilo.” - Antonia Peplinski, @Wisconsinitos

“Overall, I couldn’t stop reading and didn’t want to, even though the anxiety and stress were bleeding through. What a brave, soul-baring piece of work that is so personal and so universal too. The writing was poetic and informative in an accessible and relatable way. It was so interesting to read about a very different immigration experience to the ones we commonly see.” - NetGalley Reviewer Georgia T.

The book is incredibly touching and really well written…It’s about grieving your homeland and the desire to make a new country your home, to build a life you can feel safe and happy in. On having to change and grieve our dreams for the future when our bodies and circumstances won’t allow for said dreams. -NetGalley Reviewer, E.R.

This book has been a labor of love, and I am beyond excited to share it with you! If you do decide to read it, please feel free to reach out and let me know your thoughts, or consider leaving a review on Goodreads or Amazon.

Thanks for being here with me through this journey–we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled content next week.

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Amber Stewart is a writer, editor, and founder of Unbordered Magazine, a literary publication documenting the stories of Americans living outside the United States. She lives in Montevideo, Uruguay with her wife, Jamie, and their dog, Libby. In the Garden: An Almanac for Uprooting is her debut book.

It’s been just over six months since we stepped off the plane at Carrasco International Airport with our three year old son Omid and his then not quite two year old brother Azad. We knew we’d be arriving at the tale end of what had been a very cold Southern Cone winter, but after a decade and a half in Hawai’i, the temperature was still jarring.

This was part of our new reality, part of the trade off we made to no longer be complicit. In our living room in Punta del Este, my wife Bahar sprinkles water on a plate of lentil sprouts. Although today is the autumnal equinox here in Uruguay, in the Northern Hemisphere, including Iran, it’s the first day of spring. The Persian new year, Nowruz, which means “new day” in Farsi, has been celebrated for thousands of years. With these lentil sprouts, the sabzi part of our haft-sin display, Bahar tries her best to honor that tradition. Her name is the Persian word for spring and anyone who has met my wife will agree it’s the perfect name for her. She was born during springtime in Tehran in the early years after the revolution when there was still a glimmer of hope. For Bahar, every day is a new day, and in every moment, no matter how dark, a reason to smile. She radiates life and love and hope. Amazingly, because of humanity, not in spite of it.

We had already started the paperwork, already gotten fingerprinted, already broken the news to our loved ones that we were leaving, before the bombs started to fall on Iran last June. We had decided even before the steady uptick in fighter jets training to kill in the skies above Hawai’i last spring. If we weren’t already sure that we were making the right decision, this would have removed any doubt.

Bahar fled Iran with her mom when she was a baby, bouncing around the world for the nearly five years her dad spent as a political prisoner. She went to preschool in Honolulu, kindergarten in Germany, and ultimately grew up in Northern California after her dad escaped and her family was reunited. As an adult, she moved back to Hawai’i, which is where we met in the spring of 2014. We got married a year later, on Nowruz, eleven years ago today. Shortly thereafter, we set out on a four month journey that was part honeymoon, part scouting mission. Although we’d traveled vastly different paths to get to where we were ideologically, we were on the same page as we started looking for a new home outside the U.S..

We fell in love with the Azores, the beautiful Portuguese archipelago that’s known as the Hawai’i of the Atlantic, and planned to move there until emigrating proved more difficult than we’d imagined. Ultimately, we decided to stay in Hawai’i. We took a friend up on his offer to become caretakers of his five acre homestead on Moloka’i, the island where I was living at the time we met. With a population of less than eight thousand people and no traffic lights, Moloka’i became our home together for the next decade. We grew a lot of food, rescued a lot of animals, and tried our best to be good neighbors to those in our community struggling as a direct result of colonization and the ongoing US occupation. More and more, we saw pain and suffering. More and more, our hearts broke.

Around the time Bahar and I met, I had become a war-tax resistor. Together, we lived our lives divested from the system as much as possible, but to merely exist in such a system is to be complicit in human suffering. Since it’s very much a forced complicity, I have so much compassion for those unable to leave. I also have compassion for the 18, 19, 20 something year old men and women in the US military and don’t fault them for going to war in Iran anymore than I fault myself for going to war in Iraq. Undereducated, naive, blindly patriotic, I genuinely believed I was doing something good when I willingly enlisted. I believed I’d be helping my community, my country, and all the poor souls not fortunate enough to have been born in the greatest country in human history. I really believed that.

I knew nothing about the reality of US history, nothing about Iraq or Afghanistan, nothing about Iran. It wasn’t until I met Bahar that I learned about the US helping overthrow a democracy in Iran in 1953, helping ensure democracy didn’t return after the revolution, and helping arm both sides during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s. The sad, difficult truth I have to live with is that I willingly served what Dr. King called the greatest purveyor of evil in the world, and I would have willingly put my boots on the ground in Iran if that’s where I’d been sent two decades ago. Iran or anywhere else.

Bahar’s parents, who left San Francisco in 2018 to live nearby their only child in Hawai’i, are currently making their final preparations to join us here in Uruguay. She talks with them every day and most days it’s a video call so they can see their grandsons. What had been normal, light-hearted conversations catching them up on all the new parks, beaches, and playgrounds we’ve taken the boys to, has turned into a daily update on the health and wellbeing of Bahar’s aunt’s, uncle’s, and cousins in Iran. Twenty, or is it twenty-one days of war now? With an internet blackout in Iran, calls are infrequent. My father-in-law’s oldest brother called him a couple days ago. Everyone in the family is still alive, though over a thousand other people have been killed in Iran and over a thousand other people have been killed in Lebanon in just the past few weeks. More and more bombs drop every day. The air and the rain are toxic. Anxiety is high.

I wish so badly Bahar’s parents were already here. I wish flights weren’t getting cancelled because of skyrocketing fuel costs. I wish they didn’t have encounter unpaid TSA agents, or their possible ICE replacements. They’re so excited to get here but it literally can’t happen fast enough. A major storm is currently hitting Hawai’i for the second time in less than a week, and the flooding is catastrophic. Some of our friends’ homes are already under water and a massive 120 year old dam, owned and neglected by Dole (the pineapple company) is on the brink of collapsing. As if that’s not all enough to worry about on top of moving to the other side of the world, Bambino, their elderly Chihuahua who was scheduled to make the journey here as well, died this past week. His tiny heart gave out.

Our decision to leave was ultimately Bahar’s parents’ decision. Moving to Portugal while they were still in California would have been bad enough but there’s no way Bahar could have left them on a small island in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Especially now that they have grandchildren. Ultimately, they wanted Omid and Azad to grow up safe and healthy and happy with two loving parents who are also safe and healthy and happy. After we left Moloka’i for Honolulu a year ago, before they had even followed us over there, Bahar’s parents let us know they were willing to follow us if we moved to Uruguay. Bahar’s mom would have gone anywhere. Her dad, after exhaustive research, and knowing it’s a place that had long been on our radar, decided that, at 75, he’d be willing to uproot his life, move halfway around the world, and learn what will be his fourth language, only for Uruguay. Only for Omid and Azad.

After a couple miscarriages, Omid arrived in July 2022. His name is the Persian word for hope. A couple months after he was born, the Iranian people were rising up once again. The ayatollah was aging and frail. Upon his death, there would surely be a new day, things would inevitably change, so long as the Americans, the British, the Israelis didn’t ruin it, hope would prevail. A year later, in September 2023, Azad was born. His name means freedom, or ‘to be free’ in Farsi. He was twenty-seven days old on October 7th. The days, weeks, and months that followed were a blur. We spent a couple months holding regular vigils calling for an end to the genocide. That winter we hosted a 12-part Palestinian film series at our local public library, and we continued to sell Palestinian olive oil at our local Saturday farmers market, as we had been doing for years, to raise money to help farmers in Jenin plant new olive trees. We stared into our cellphone screens helplessly, in complete horror, as an open air prison long under siege, barely one third the size of the tiny island of Moloka’i, was completely obliterated. It became impossible to hold my newborn son and his one year old brother and not cry.

I missed the last film night while I was in Istanbul as part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. After a month surrounded by doctors and aid workers and all sorts of human rights activists, the former mayor of Barcelona, Che Guevara’s daughter, and Nelson Mandela’s grandson, people who were all willing to risk their lives to do the only humane thing there was to do, we were ultimately blocked by the Turkish government from even leaving port. Thousands of tons of food and medicine waiting on our ship and my own government sent diplomats to Turkey to threaten Erdogan into capitulating. At that point, I was ready to fly to Egypt to rent a boat, fill it with as much food and medicine as possible, and set sail for Gaza by myself. Instead, I flew back to Hawai’i completely dejected. I would have given anything to be able to bring even one bite of food for one person, so in their suffering, in their dying, they could have felt a little less alone and forsaken. I wanted to dig through the rubble in search of children no less precious than my own. I couldn’t continue to live under the flag of an empire causing so much pain and suffering in Palestine and so many other places around the world. We had to do something, in the short-term, we thought living in a city might help.

During our nine months in Honolulu, it was cathartic to march with thousands through the streets of Waikiki and to regularly be in community with so many other people who felt the same way we did. Unfortunately, every day as I pushed Omid and Azad in their stroller to the playground, beach, park, zoo, cat cafe, literally anywhere we went, there would be at least one or two and sometimes a dozen or more fighter jets, helicopters, or other military aircraft flying above us. Hawai’i is among the most beautiful places on the planet, but, especially on Oahu, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s basically one big military base. I wish I could have continued to exist beneath the red, white and blue flags of the American empire, continued to stand in solidarity with my native Hawaiian friends and neighbors in their struggle for sovereignty, but my moral injury wouldn’t allow me to. My wife deserves a husband and my children deserve a father. We had to leave.

Not therapy, not medication, not meditation, not long walks on the beach, not half a dozen plant medicine ceremonies, nothing has provided the relief that I’ve felt since stepping off the plane here in Uruguay. I had been searching for peace of mind for many years and have been sober for over a decade now in pursuit of it. Jon Kabat-Zinn once said, “wherever you go, there you are” and that’s true, I’m still here the same as I was in Hawai’i. The difference is, there are no war planes training above me now. None of my neighbors are cheering on death and destruction, or funding hell on earth for other people. They’re drinking mate while watching the sunset, and they’re funding healthcare and education, parks and recreation. I’m still acutely aware of the horrific things happening all over the world at the hands of the US empire, but it’s a relief to no longer be complicit.

Like so many others, Bahar’s mom had little choice where she landed when she fled with a baby in her arms. If there is courage in our decision to emigrate, it’s certainly a different type of courage, a courage comfortably nestled in the arms of privilege. While our reasons for wanting to leave are valid, we had the luxury to decide where in the world we wanted to live, where we wanted to raise our children. Bahar and I didn’t find some magical, mythical place. There’s a lot of natural beauty here in Uruguay, but there’s endless natural beauty from California to Colorado to Cape Cod. Certainly in Hawai’i. What we found is a country that isn’t perfect, but is human. More importantly, it’s humane. Uruguay learns from the horrors of its past, it doesn’t ignore them and continue to double down.

It’s beautiful to see what a society can look like when compassion is part of the culture and when resources aren’t consumed by war and oppression. It’s also heartbreaking to think about how easily the United States could have what Uruguay has. Everyone deserves this. I may never find true peace of mind, I’m not sure I would even recognize it. What I’ve found is a place that, even as half my heart is trapped beneath the rubble in Gaza, and even as bombs are dropped on the country of my wife’s birth by the country I risked my life serving, I can still breathe. The air seems different here in a way that’s difficult to describe, almost as if the trees are happier, almost as if they know they’re not hurting anyone. I look forward to watching Omid and Azad grow up surrounded by these trees.

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This piece was originally published under the title “Hope” in Issue 03 of Unbordered Magazine.

Jason is a husband and a father of two young sons who recently moved to Uruguay from Hawai’i.

This is where I leave you,

with my unfinished pieces,
ones that I haven’t tended
to in quite some time.
The various versions
of me half painted/ half
peeking through cloth, strewn
and askew in the guest bedroom.
These self portraits are staring
me down, daring me to bring
them out, touch up the paint and
play…
But I can’t.
And I won’t.
I walk around the room and gently
touch all the ones I chose not to become.
I linger on some a little longer than others.
I hold up my latest painting and admire it.
You were the closest I’ve ever come to
being done, but the colors weren’t quite
vibrant enough and the lines were still
a little rough.

Gratitude

Gratitude lives in my feet/ my hands/ and swells in my chest/ I dance in my kitchen to Pink Pony Club/ my baby laughs/ I shake my hips and sing at the top of my lungs/ my ligaments are loose/ I didn’t know it was possible to feel so relaxed/ my joints have so much room to move/ my chest expands/ my heart cracks/ wide open/ my eldest smiles her real smile/ pure joy/ magic in the making/ I wish I could freeze this moment/ I’m so thankful that we left/ gratitude glows golden/ and/ it feels like

freedom

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Jessica Wilde is an American Immigrant living in Aotearoa New Zealand. She spends her days teaching primary school and spending time with her family. She is currently working on her debut poetry collection titled The Not So American Dream. She craves reading poetry on rainy days, women in leadership roles, and an endless supply of coffee.

“I don’t like it when people call me a boy...”

Those were the words our oldest daughter told my wife and me when she was four years old. For two years, we noticed that she was not like the boys that we had forced her to play with, often looking at them as though they were aliens and crying when she looked in the mirror. With each performance of “Let It Go” that we were held captive audience to, we assumed we had a future theater kid. Naomi would appropriate scarves, ties, belts, and anything else she deemed sufficient to make into an Elsa braid.

One afternoon, in the fall of 2021, as we sat on our back patio, it all clicked when our daughter confided in us, “I don’t like it when people call me a boy.” I do not remember who asked why, but I have a vivid memory of her looking at us, her brow furrowed, as if she were confused about why we were asking. “Because I’m not a boy, I’m a girl.” That was five years ago.

The next few months were a flurry of information gathering and laying a foundation to assist Naomi through her journey, which we, at the time, were not fully equipped to support. Podcasts, books, articles, pediatrician recommendations, gender-affirming therapists, and groups; it was all fair game. Over the years, our network of families going through similar journeys expanded—yes, there are a lot of us, but many families fear being targeted and cannot be open about it. We, however, were fortunate to live in Colorado, and found that our neighbors, friends, family, and schools were not only accepting but also supportive of Naomi. At the time, we lived what we thought was a perfect life in what we referred to as “our forever home.”

During the 2024 presidential election, Republicans spent nearly $215 million on television ads targeting transgender people, a group that makes up less than one percent of the population. Still, after the 2024 presidential election, my wife and I were worried but held out hope that our government would protect our daughter’s right to exist.

Two months later, our greatest fears were realized when, on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump took office and immediately began announcing his executive orders targeting transgender people. “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” was the first anti-trans executive order signed by Trump.

Lack of brevity in naming aside, the executive order was a shot across the bow, signaling that our family needed a backup plan if things got worse. And they did. In the month that followed, the Trump administration signed four additional anti-trans executive orders.

“We need to get out of here,” my wife said.

I was sitting at the dining room table when she said those words, and, like when our daughter came out to us, a part of me already knew. The discussions that followed focused on where we could go and the various hypotheticals that could play out, impacting our urgency to leave.

Again, our lives were dominated by research: visas, residencies, cultures, crime/safety, remote work, healthcare, gender-affirming care, how to sleep when your world is crashing down, and schools.

Eventually, we determined that Mexico’s proximity to the United States would be optimal for both family and work obligations. As the top LGBTQIA+ destination of Mexico, and with an ample amount of immigrants—they call them “expats” here—we chose Puerto Vallarta as our jumping-off point.

The next five months were a blur, and in a bizarre, undiagnosed medical anomaly, my sphincter found a new home in my throat. We packed what we needed and told the girls that we were leaving the United States because the government was making laws that were unfair for our family. At the same time, we sold nearly all our possessions and said goodbye to our friends, family, and forever home.

Our initial week was set to be a whirlwind: obtaining residency, signing a lease, and completing the testing required for the school we had been in touch with for several months. Shortly before our flight, we were notified by the school that they no longer had openings for us, for reasons that we speculate were related to Naomi’s gender identity. My wife and I were heartbroken and upset, but we also had our first encounter with the “things happen for a reason” culture that is prevalent in Mexico, which we are still getting accustomed to.

For anyone who has not experienced Puerto Vallarta in July, it can best be described as having your entire body wrapped in gym socks full of sweaty armpits. Not having a car meant that even short trips to the grocery store left me looking like Ursula Andress emerging from the beach in Dr. No, minus any seductiveness.

Neither my wife nor I speaks Spanish. My parents are both fluent; however, I somehow made it to my mid-forties barely able to order from a Taco Bell. So even in the air-conditioned grocery store, I found myself in interactions that replaced heat sweats with nervous sweats, which smell worse and look more like someone who just committed a crime. Within the first week of our arrival, I was questioning whether we should begin exploring other, cooler cities in Mexico.

Before we left, my wife’s friend told her that what helped her move abroad was taking time to celebrate all the firsts, no matter how difficult or easy they were. So, we did: my youngest daughter’s first trip to the beach, their first day at a Mexican school, our first Spanish lessons, and our first earthquake—I would be content to not celebrate a second of the latter.

Living in Mexico has been an amalgam of culture and art, with customs and infrastructure that have required some acclimating for our family. While credit cards are accepted at many restaurants and stores, it is not guaranteed, nor is it guaranteed that their machines will be working that day. We learned quickly that you should keep your head down when walking, or you might trip over cobblestones, broken sidewalks, or step in—pick your animal—excrement. Also, somehow keep your head up when walking, because a pipe might be dripping onto the sidewalk, or you might run into an air conditioner unit inconveniently placed at eye level.

Of all the learning experiences, one of my favorites has been the handling of time, which is often wrapped in a tortilla of vagueness. The nebulousness of time in Puerto Vallarta is made evident in “ahora,” which translates to “now,” meaning anytime other than this moment, because that would be “ahora mismo.”

Before leaving the house one morning, I checked a store’s Facebook page—Facebook pages are more common than websites—for their hours, then arrived fifteen minutes after their scheduled opening, only to find a herd of completely unbothered people waiting outside the locked door. Thirty minutes later, the store opened. On another occasion, our family arrived at a birthday party at the time the invitation said it started, only to find ourselves setting up the decorations until the rest of the guests arrived, anywhere from one to three hours later. It’s 1 AM, think it’s time for sleeping? Not in December, when you can listen to outdoor bands playing until the wee hours of the morning and fireworks, or possibly dynamite, going off for no apparent reason—or perhaps it is in The Bible.

Above all, my biggest takeaway has been how incredible my daughters are. In 2020 and 2021, during COVID, I often heard how resilient kids are. The pessimist in me would scoff or want to ask whether those people would be willing to pay for the therapy my kids would require for all their resiliency during what we thought at the time was as bad as it could get. But it’s true. Every day, my daughters prove they are grittier than I ever imagined.

Throughout this experience, they have kept their gripes to a minimum, despite saying goodbye to everything they had known for their entire lives, and embraced adjusting to new lives in a different country. With each word or sentence I hear them speak in Spanish, each friend they make, each new food tried, I am filled with pride.

The past five years have been scary as a parent, and the last eight months have caused an abundance of platinum blonde hairs to grow on my otherwise black beard. While not as large as the community we built in Colorado, we are making friends. More importantly, we are creating indelible memories for our daughters in a place where acceptance is the norm.

This morning, while making breakfast, I looked out the window and noticed a fire in the distance. My daughters and I went out and looked at it, curious whether it was a house or burning trash.

Within twenty minutes, several more fires appeared, and before we knew it, there were fires surrounding the city. El Mencho, the head of a cartel, was killed, and we were witnessing the fallout from the retaliation.

The local news had not reported any civilian deaths, but we wanted to be prepared to leave if it came to that. I had to isolate myself for a few minutes because my heart raced and my legs shook. Like animals, kids can sense fear, so I wanted to compose myself before we began preparing.

My wife and I drew the shades, messaged friends and family, discussed an exit plan, and told the girls to stay away from the windows. We said that we did not know exactly what was happening, but that no matter what, we would do whatever it takes to keep them safe.

As more details became available, we explained that cartels were setting fires to cars. Naomi, always our inquisitive one, had a dozen questions:

What is a cartel?

Why are they burning cars?

How do they make money off of drugs?

It was difficult to answer everything when we were unsure ourselves.

While we tossed toothbrushes, toilet paper, cash, and our documents into backpacks, the girls packed essentials like stuffed animals, “treasures” they collected off the street, and fruit snacks. For the next few hours, we distracted the girls with games and screens—keep your shaming to yourself—and listened to the local news, in Spanish. Then waited.

By 2 PM, the city was quiet. Smoke still smoldered from several unextinguished fires, but there were no reports of new ones. There have been announcements that stores and schools will be closed tomorrow, but officials do not expect any additional incidents. We watched a movie together, but our hackles were still up, and remained that way until the kids went to bed.

As I write this, it is almost midnight, and solitude breeds reflection. Again, I am in awe of my daughters’ incredible resilience. Perhaps it is youthful ignorance, but I think it is more than that; throughout the ordeal, they remained calm and cooperated with us, something that we cannot always say on a typical day.

When we left the United States, we thought we were leaving the violence behind. During our first school tour in Mexico, we noticed a sign for earthquake drills, and asked whether they also practice active shooter drills. The woman giving the tour raised an eyebrow and explained that they do not have that problem like in America.

That is not to say that Puerto Vallarta is without violence. As of last year, it was estimated to have 15.6 homicides per 100,000 people, which is still a far cry from even relatively safe Denver, but it feels different.

Unlike the United States, the violence we experienced today was between the government and cartels; civilians were not targeted.

While messages continue to flood in from friends in the United States, asking if we are safe, we are reading about the US government abducting and killing citizens in the streets, refusing to prosecute child predators, and further dividing its people through race, gender, and sexual orientation culture wars.

As I look outside at a city that wears the ashes of a skirmish, I still feel safer than in the country aflame that we left behind. The last year has been difficult, but at least I know that should we need to flee again, my daughters will be fine.

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In June 2025, Orlando de los Santos and his family moved to Mexico to provide a better life for his trans daughter (featured in a to-be-released documentary shortlisted for SXSW). As part of the move, he pressed pause on a 20-year career in IT, joined a writing group, and has been dedicating time to writing short stories, essays, and manuscripts.

you’d imagine lines as silhouette
then a heart in broken shadow

hardly breathing

maybe there’s a rhythm to the equator
spinning though never moving 
so much depends on not knowing
what happens has happened again
the world dies on time and stays there 
for the heroes and the ghosts
learn to speak in measured doubt
draw the motion of someone’s eyes
as they leave inspiration to rest

i sometimes reach past myself
rise and fall to the touch of her memory
fight with spirits within my head
place offerings of belief like pearls
spend hours to retrace the tears
i listen to the hopes of icons 
falling to a bronze creator in alabaster
until all that’s mine becomes hers

rubi’s vigil

some return from a horizon of long ago
holding hands that are muted
sacrificed to embered statues as fire
wants to be at first
contained by the blackness of an urn
when the frost circles its depth 
and you can’t stand it any longer 
as you were right then 
and the winds too cold to leave ripples
cloud a place you can’t recall
branches shudder from such drowning 

who’s going to light candles which god
looks to that vintage daguerreotype
the silver that disrupts the mekong’s gold 
an unlikely sunset thrives to be here 
long enough to hold the head so close
a setting that won’t let you go

something of a woman’s sandalwood gown 
burnt to hover in vapors of smoke 
lining the currents of a summer wind 
spills from the weeping humidity 
so much the gods stand frozen 
unable to reply to our chants 
their own prayers misheard in the silence

silk

such heavy gold must have dripped from
the sky in waves you’d see from the sun
but don’t stay too long 
don’t look here  
at the feet hand-forged tile geometry
inscribed meaning a visitor’s edifice
taking turns the next one taught to learn 
incense handed over right to the left hand

though some can’t read the scripted gods
pure white banners sashes that surround
all around columns that heighten the eaves
of the roof of tiled green moss
how weathered they are seen from
the inside out unlike the gods they shelter

iron circles these columns holding intact
the only grey relief worth seeing
just ask the monks who learned prayers
and fed ore to the ochre furnace 
here alone you can see the red tongue 
depicted as such and screeching 
a stone foot that grinds 
a flowered serpent to the ground but
may recover next spring as evil recoils 
for the next visitor to begin their memory

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Kenneth Kesner (肯内思) splits his time between the Caucasus and South East Asia. Some recent works are featured in: the engine(idling, Glint Literary Journal, Midsummer Dream House, Pictura Journal, and Plato’s Caves.

Dad leaves behind a duplex in the city, but Mom doesn’t want to live there, and that’s sad but okay. One day it’s raining sideways outside and my friend Dena’s parents kick her out. Her boyfriend won’t take her in because he’s afraid his friends will find out she’s trans like me. So I give her the unit above mine.

Dena’s like, “Thanks Ma!” and I’m like, “I’m not your Ma, Ma!” and we wrestle her furniture up the stairs, and I spy a crack in the landing wall. Turns out it’s a door, and behind it another whole-ass stair, and then another whole-ass apartment.

Which makes zero sense until we meet Jamal and Fritz at the cafe. Nobody will rent them a place. We’re like, “Come stay with us!” and they’re like, “Hellz yeah!” and we move them in and surprise! Another crack, another stair, another apartment.

That unit goes to a family on the run from Tennessee, and the next one (turns out there’s always a next one) to a mother and son fleeing Florida. I think, wait, don’t buildings fall down when they get too tall? But we keep finding abandoned kids—from Idaho, from Indiana, from everywhere—and the house keeps growing, fifty states high and then some, until it looks like a tower of big ol’ pizza boxes spiraling up through the clouds.

One day, Dena comes home crying. Her boyfriend’s friends found her out, and he tried to take it out of her hide. I hold her like Mom used to hold me. Together we watch the rain fall sideways, and listen to the floors creak beneath the weight of friends we love like family, and outside, the storm throws itself against this house that rises up and up and never falls.

This piece was originally published in Queer Sci Fi’s anthology Rise.

Meghan Hyland is a tall woman who writes in an even taller building on the other side of the globe. Her stories have appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Embodied Exegesis, the transfemme cyberpunk anthology.

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There are moments when you don’t know how time keeps moving.

Like standing in line for the flight that will take you away from your home forever, boarding pass in hand, kids in tow, heart pounding in your chest, everything seems to freeze.

But the minutes pass. Time gently takes you by the hand, and soon, your feet are moving forward, step by step, carrying you away.

The doors shut, the pilot tells you to prepare for takeoff, and as the plane lifts, you feel your lungs fill with the oxygen of being carried away.

It’s a cliff, and with your family, here you are, jumping straight off of the edge, and the free-fall is a crowded cabin, a toddler force-feeding you pretzels, and fitful sleep with tiny feet in your face. It is hearing after both an eternity and a single moment that we’re ready for landing.

“Kia ora, and welcome to New Zealand,” the pilot crackled over the speaker, and I caught my love’s blue eyes as we both realised that landing was imminent. I felt the free-fall in my diaphragm.

Moments like that define your entire life. Jumping, together, into the unknown.

And we were not ready at all, but the doors cracked open, and our feet moved, kept moving, stayed in motion, through queues and lines and customs and stamped paperwork and out into the dawn of the day, where it was humid and smelled like the sea. We stepped outside and felt the air for the first time, holding steaming mince pies in the cold of winter.

It was warm, though, for a winter morning, we marvelled.

After both a single moment and an eternity of waiting, we were on the road, time opening our doors for us, buckling us in, lovingly. My husband, white-knuckled, was driving on the wrong side of the road, and the children and I twisted like vines around ourselves to see everything outside the windows. The lush and green. The rolling hills. With a gasp, the expanse of water rolling over the dry mountains that live inside our skin.

There is nothing like experiencing a new country for the first time.

At stoplights, my love gripped my hand. In moments, I looked at my children in their soft, round little eyes and smiled at them. They wiggled like little worms and kept repeating, “We’re here.”

My love put on a song as we passed over the Harbour Bridge. I could feel his soul swelling out of his skin, too, and it’s like we held each other there in the space between us.

I know I’ve got you, the reverse car sang to us, and you know you’ve got me.

The ocean swelled up to meet us as we finished crossing the bridge, to drive right up the coast.

We’ve got everything we need.

And we did—suitcases in the back. Children strapped in. Nothing but each other, over the hills, onto the peninsula of our new home.

The sun was shining as we leapt out of the car, the wind rushed into the house with us as we surged into a new life.

We arrived, ready to live in that new beginning forever, but time keeps pushing us forward, doesn’t it?

It pushed us to the wharf, where I met you, to tell you your mother had died, where together we crumpled like a soda can.

To the sea on the first warm day, two months later, where, after being submerged in our own grief, we finally came up for air.

To our first spring Halloween, haunting for candy among the flower buds.

To the long and dark driveway, where at the top, we picked up our little cat’s body in a cardboard box.

To places underground, where carnivorous worms glow like bright galaxies, and reflect afterwards in our children’s imaginations for weeks.

To nights of desperation, of shaking hands, of tears, of being misunderstood, judged, and unwelcome.

To the moments where, holding each other tenderly, we know we’re the only ones alive who will always try to understand each other. We are the keepers of trust, knowing what’s in our own hearts.

In each of these moments, time stopped, but the minutes walked, continued to walk, carried us through the hours and the days and the weeks and

after an eternity, and a single moment,

here we are, wrapped in linen in the sunshine, and

our hands are clasped, and I know I’ve got you,

and you know you’ve got me, and

we’ve got everything we need.

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is a mother, writer, computer nerd, American immigrant in New Zealand, and author of These Chasms in the Earth. Her works have appeared in Welcoming the Muse (Twenty Bellows), Poems in Praise of Libraries (World Stage Press), Gysophilia Literary Magazine, Retrograde Review, Canvas Creative Arts Magazine (Indiana University), and on a set of compost liners. Stone shares her stories of motherhood, sacrifice, and rebirth at open mics and on socials: cecilystonespeaks. On the weekends, you can usually find her alongside her husband and children finding adventure in her new home country.

Issue 03: Exploration is now live on our website in digital flipbook format, offering a more visual, intentional way to experience the magazine as a whole.

If you’d prefer to read more gradually, you can also subscribe here to receive weekly featured pieces from the issue, shared over the coming weeks as part of our newsletter.

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From the Editor’s Desk

When we chose the theme “exploration,” it was before we knew there was going to be a mission around the moon. During the voyage of Artemis II, I, like most of the world, watched in awe and hope as the crew went further from the Earth than anyone had ever been before. The moment was a powerful reminder of what humanity is capable of when we work towards a greater goal. And it sat in stark contrast to what was happening on the ground—a war baserd on the petty whims of a madman given unprecedented power.

In its best form, this is what exploration should be: discovering our own capabilities, questioning assumptions about who and what we are, and encountering the unknown with open minds and hearts. But, we know, historically, that this is not what it has been about. The people we have named Great Explorers have often also been Great Colonizers or Great Oppressors. Their “discoveries” mistook “new to them” for “new to everyone” because the indigenous peoples they encountered–who did not look like them–could, of course, not be counted as people. This is the legacy that exploration has left behind: one of validation through (white) experience and usurped authority. Let’s not forget they put a flag on the moon.

And this is the legacy that we now have to reckon with as Americans who move abroad, especially if we are moving to the Global South or places with less global power.

But it is my hope that, as we explore this issue, we can harness our curious spirit and use it for good–that we can look inside of ourselves and unearth the ways that being an American has formed our being, sifting through the ash to find important artifacts.

In this issue, Jessica Wilde explores what it means to leave unfinished parts of yourself behind, and Kenneth Kesner explores grief, ritual, and sacred space. Orlando de los Santos explores what it looks like to rally a family around a trans child, and Jason Mizula searches for a life that causes less harm. Cecily Stone explores the moment of arrival that feels like freefall, and Sarah Bolen examines ethical exploration and shows us what it’s like to guide other explorers. Meghan Hyland explores how a community can magically grow to accommodate the people who need it, and artist Gerrit Vooren explores creating in the moment, mistakes included.

These are beautiful stories full of hope and sadness and grief and dancing. I’m so honored to share them with you.

Let’s go exploring!

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Amber Stewart is the founder and poetry editor of Unbordered. She moved from Nashville to Montevideo, Uruguay in 2024, where she lives with her wife and their dog. Her debut memoir-in-essays, In the Garden: An Almanac for Uprooting is forthcoming.

Editor’s Note: This piece, originally published in August 2025 under the title "I'm Not an Expat. I'm an Immigrant," is an excerpt from Amber Stewart's forthcoming memoir-in-essays, "In the Garden: An Almanac for Uprooting." We're resharing it this week as we put the finishing touches on Issue 03, which drops May 4th. We'll be back next week with new content, and we can't wait to share what we've been working on.

I am an immigrant.

And my story, like most immigrant stories, is difficult to tell. But, for me, for the other Americans who are escaping the rise of the far right, even nailing down the words can be troublesome.

This is because, historically, the word “immigrant” hasn’t been applied to Americans. It has generally only applied to those traveling from less market-driven places to ones that are more developed and more flush with capital. For those of us from the “first world,” (a term I have come to despise more and more since arriving in Uruguay), we get to claim the term, “expat.” But what does it actually mean to use these terms?

The “expat” is someone who lives abroad not out of need, but out of opportunity. Their journey is labeled an “adventure.” The adventure takes advantage of the low cost of things and of labor in their new country to attempt to live well above their means. Their journeys are highly documented and seen as aspirational. An expat is usually someone with privilege, someone who doesn’t have to worry about how local civil rights laws might impact them. The expat doesn’t de-construct power systems because they benefit from them. An expat doesn’t assimilate. An expat may or may not learn the local language. An expat expects amenities. An expat is quick to exoticize and trivialize. She doesn’t stay long.

An immigrant, on the other hand, leaves their home because they feel they have to. They leave to seek better opportunity somewhere else because home doesn’t have enough of them. The journey is not an adventure—or not only that—but it begins a path full of mourning, identity shifting, immense joy, and never feeling like you fit in. The immigrant lives within their means. The immigrant is inspirational and also reviled. An immigrant moved because their civil rights were being violated. The immigrant knows the systems that keep her down and strategizes around them. An immigrant learns the local language because it makes it easier to get a job. An immigrant doesn’t expect convenience. An immigrant approaches their choice of community with humility and curiosity. An immigrant does not plan to leave.

I will admit that, as an American, I do have more privilege than a lot of other people who carry the “immigrant” label world-wide. But, on the whole, I identify more with the immigrant label. I am queer. My wife is trans. We left the U.S. because our rights were on the line. We plan to live here in Uruguay indefinitely. We both have jobs here. We are building a life and a community. We didn’t leave because we wanted to, but now that we are here, we are working, every day, to find the joy of belonging.

I choose to identify with the “immigrant” label because, ultimately, an “expat” engages with their living space as a consumer. And personally, I’m more interested in preservation, adaptation, and learning what it means to call a new country home.

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Amber Stewart is the founder and poetry editor of Unbordered. She moved from Nashville to Montevideo, Uruguay in 2024, where she lives with her wife and their dog. Her debut memoir-in-essays, In the Garden: An Almanac for Uprooting, is forthcoming.

We have some exciting news to share: Issue 03 of Unbordered is coming out on May 4th, and we could not be more proud of what we’re putting together. We can’t wait for you to read it!

In the meantime, we wanted to remind you that we currently have two open calls for submissions, and we’d love to hear from you.

Issue 04: Reinvention (Deadline: July 1, 2026)

For Issue 04, we’re looking for writing and visual art that explores reinvention as a lived process rather than a polished outcome. We’re interested in moments when old identities no longer fit, when familiar narratives fall apart, and when something tentative and new begins to take shape. For this issue, we welcome work that lingers in uncertainty.

Not sure where to start? Try one of these:

• Write about something you stopped calling yourself after you left.

• Describe a habit, ritual, or routine you built from scratch in a new place.

• Make a piece of art that shows what “starting over” looks like before it’s finished.

Issue 05: Thresholds (Deadline: October 1, 2026)

A threshold is a place of suspension: the moment before the door opens, the breath before the word, the last look back. Issue 05 invites essays, nonfiction, poetry, and art that sit with these in-between moments. Tell us what you carry across, and what you’re leaving behind.

Not sure where to start? Try one of these:

• Write about the last ordinary moment before everything changed.

• Describe a word or phrase you can only say in one language, and what it costs you not to use it.

• Make a piece of art about something you carried with you that you didn’t expect to need.

For submission guidelines, word counts, and formats, visit our submissions page.

We’re so grateful for this community, and we can’t wait to read what you send us!

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