From Place to Place by Judy RayFrom Place to Place
Personal Essays
by Judy Ray

WHIRLYBIRD PRESS, 2015
Shawnee, Kansas

Paperback, 170 pages
ISBN 978-0-9647053-8-8
Cover art by Suzanne Stryk

$14.00 (+ $3.00 postage)


"A brilliantly crafted and beautifully written series of essays….with just a trace of a British accent and a strong sense of the irony of human existence. Her leaps of thought and imagination are daring and sure-footed. From Place to Place is a fascinating book."

—RICHARD SHELTON [Going Back to Bisbee and Crossing the Yard]


"Judy Ray has the spirit of an explorer, the conscience of a Quaker, and the descriptive power of a poet. Raised on a farm in England, she ventured to Uganda, the U.S., India, Australia, and, in these essays, she takes us along."

—BARTON SUTTER [Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map and My Father's War]


"In prose that is admirably fluid — and appears deceptively simple for the often complex nature of her themes — Ray wanders the literal and figurative geography of her rich and varied life in a series of essays connected by the themes of cultural diversity and the meaning of place. A native of southern England, she has lived in Africa, Australia, India, all over continental Europe, and in the United States. Long ago naturalized as a U.S. citizen, she describes the serpentine, Kafkaesque workings of the immigration bureaucracy and finds beneath its layers occasion to explore the nature of identity."

—BOB SOMMER [from the blog Uncommon Hours; read more here]


These essays (and a sprinkling of poems) explore subjects both far and near — the process of becoming a U.S. citizen, travel in places where the author has lived for a few months or years, helping to solve a murder, writing, an untimely tragic death, and some commonplace experiences that will be familiar to readers, such as moving to another residence or serving on jury duty.

Judy Ray is author of several poetry collections that include To Fly Without Wings (Helicon Nine Editions). Her chapbooks include Fishing in Green Waters, Sleeping in the Larder: Poems of a Sussex Childhood, and Judy Ray: Greatest Hits. Earlier books are Pebble Rings, Pigeons in the Chandeliers, and a prose memoir about India, The Jaipur Sketchbook. While living in Kansas City, she was an associate editor of New Letters magazine, and then the first director of The Writers Place, a literary community center. She now lives in Tucson, Arizona.

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