This collection of short stories, now available for pre-ordering at Main Street Rag, features a diverse array of travelers who cross paths between the U.S. and eight African nations. They are challenged, sometimes deeply disturbed, but always brought to see the world anew. Their stories reflect the tangle of cross-cultural interactions that take place every day as real travelers from real places try to connect despite all the differences that so easily divide.
“In these varied and poignant stories, Tim Bascom’s writing is as sharp as it is tender. . . Richly observed and beautifully written, the stories in Continental Drift will stay with you long after the final page.” —Rebecca McKanna, author of the novel Don’t Forget the Girl
“Through chance encounters, unforeseen dangers, lack of control, displacement, and the hunger for more, these stories are life-changing journeys for characters and readers alike.” —Thomas Fox Averill award-winning author of ten books, most recently the novel Found Documents from the Life of Nell Johnson Doerr
An Excerpt
By the time they reach Bor, there are thirty people on top of the convoy trucks with their stacked supplies—sitting on the hot canvas-covered boxes. The five trucks are white UNICEF trucks with civilian drivers, but UN soldiers ride next to them in each cab, wearing blue helmets and sour-smelling, sweaty camos. The soldiers, most of them short light-skinned men from Nepal, cradle worn machine guns, but they show no alertness. They are checking off the days before they will get out of this most unfortunate situation. Silently, they long for snow.
The thirty on top of the trucks, though? They are talking animatedly, pointing to things they recognize as the convoy heads north from Bor, closer to their home villages in Jonglei State, where the emergency food rations will be unloaded. They point to a distant, hill-like boulder skirted by trees or to the flickering sliver of a stream that is a tributary of the Nile. They can smell the Nile as they near it, the damp scent of river reeds and water lilies drifting across the thorny canopy.
These hitch-hiking Dinka are all trying to return to homes they had to flee during the fighting with the Nuer. They want to recover lives they never expected to abandon. They also hope others will return—neighbors and cousins and secret lovers.
They are tall, thin people with closely cropped hair and ebony skin that glints in the sun. Men in well-worn button-down shirts and women in wrap-around dresses with faded prints. But amongst the clustered riders is a pepper-haired sixty-year-old wearing a dusty suit jacket, which he refuses to take off because it lends him more dignity and because it helps hide the eight thousand U.S. dollars in a money belt under his sweat-stained dress shirt.
About the Author :
Tim Bascom, who spent half his childhood in Kansas and the other half in East Africa, has served as Executive Director of the Kansas Book Festival and, before that, as Director of Creative Writing at Waldorf University, Iowa. His books include The Boundless Game (nonfiction from the University Press of Kansas, 2026), Continental Drift (fiction from Main Street Rag, 2025), Climbing Lessons (essays from Light Messages Press, 2020), Running to the Fire (memoir from the University of Iowa Press, 2015) Chameleon Days (memoir from Houghton Mifflin, 2006), The Comfort Trap (essays from InterVarsity Press, 1993), and Squatters’ Rites (a novel from New Day Press, Philippines, 1990). His writing has been chosen for the Bakeless Literary Prize in Nonfiction, recognized as a Finalist for the IndieFab Memoir of the Year, awarded editor’s prizes at The Missouri Review and Florida Review, and selected for the anthologies Best American Travel Writing and Best Creative Nonfiction. He lives, now, in Topeka, Kansas.
Tim Bascom, Author 