About Us
We Travel On hosts the creative work of artist CJ Charles and Steve Charles, former editor of Wabash Magazine and Child Life and Jack and Jill magazines, as well as The New Platypus Review, which includes the work of many of the writers, musicians, and artists they collaborate with and admire.
“Love is not dependent upon proximity.”
That’s one of the last things my little brother told me before he died of cancer on March 9, 2020, near the beginning of the Covid pandemic. By the time I took the long train trip home from Portland to Indiana, lockdowns had started, and I knew that being trapped indoors was a recipe for depression and alcoholism.
So, contrary to my brother’s wise words, I found myself driven by an urgent desire to be with the people and in the places I love most. So I discovered safe ways to do that as much as I could. I met friends on their front porches and in parks, played music beneath their windows, even made a couple of cross country trips to visit family. All this time I was writing—songs, short pieces, endless emails and texts. I was seeing the world anew, and tried to document that with photographs.
All this chronicling was as energizing and healing as the travel. And as I corresponded more often with these family and friends I’d visited I realized my brother was right: “Love is not dependent upon proximity.”
I also found a few other people coming at the pandemic the same way, so I created a web site called “Moving Through Covid” to share and exchange some of these stories.
Then, thankfully, the pandemic subsided. But the creativity, and the energy and healing it brought, did not.
So I changed the title (I come from a family of travelers) to We Travel On and hope to collect and publish here the work of more writers and artists as we move through this new normal, although nothing is ever normal, whatever it may be.
I’d love to hear from you: charless@wabash.edu