Winner of the Best Women’s Adventure Memoir in the BAIPA Book Awards.
”Exotic Life’ is a sprawling anthology of 19 travel tales. Alpine is an inspiration to women travelers everywhere. She fearlessly wanders through one obscure destination after the other, leaving her complete trust in the experience. She answers that timeless question – Can solo women travelers really go there? – by doing just that and carrying away some wildly unique stories.’ – Rolf Pott’s Vagabonding
‘Curiosity, courage and fierce determination to remain true to her own search for truth, shines brightly and are at the core of each of Lisa Alpine’s stories. To quote Kurt Vonnegut ‘Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God’ – this could be Lisa’s motto as she dances wherever the spirit leads her’ -Maureen Wheeler, founder of Lonely Planet Publications.
Circa l’autore
The day she turned eighteen, Lisa Alpine moved to Paris. Over the next decade, she waitressed in Switzerland and picked olives in Greece, paddled the Amazon River, and created Dream Weaver Imports, a South American import company with two retail stores and a wholesale business in San Francisco.
In 1983, she gave birth to Galen Marc Alpine. That same year, she founded and published The Fax newspaper in Marin County, California. She then went on to be the Pacific Sun’s Getaway columnist for more than a decade. During this period she also freelanced for Frommers’ America on Wheels, Common Ground, San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Mothering Magazine, Paddler Magazine, Physicians’ Travel & Meeting Guide, Specialty Travel Index, and many other publications.
With her writing group, the Wild Writing Women, she co-authored Wild Writing Women: Stories of World Travel published by Globe Pequot Press in 2002. In 2009 Lisa started Good to Go Media with one of her Wild Women cohorts, Carla King, a venture that helped authors get their books out of their head and into the marketplace. They offered workshops and co-authored the Self-Publishing Boot Camp Workbook: Ten Steps to Self-Publishing Success, which they, of course, self-published.
She taught travel writing at The Writing Salon in San Francisco and Berkeley and at Kalani Resort on the Big Island of Hawai’i. For the last two decades, she has also led a plethora of writing and dance workshops in Hawai’i, New Mexico, Italy, Mexico, and France.
She is currently working on several new titles to be published by her imprint Dancing Words Press. Upcoming titles include an embellished historical nonfiction, ‘Wild Blood: Horse Thieves and Whores’, about her renegade birth parents and their Gold Rush roots. On a completely different track, her most recent book ‘Dance Life: Movin’ & Groovin’ Around the Globe’ is a collection of wild stories about dancing around the globe blended with the body-wisdom she has gleaned from twenty years of teaching dance as an ecstatic and healing art form. ‘Blessed Life’ another title in the works and will be a story collection focusing on travel with the theme of freedom.
Lisa volunteers for Earth Island Institute and the Marine Mammal Fund and has worked with Ric O’Barry’s (activist in The Cove) team to stop the dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan. She was interviewed on Smart Green Travel about swimming with wild dolphins. When not wrestling with words, exploring the ecstatic realms of dance, swimming with sea creatures, or waiting for a flight, Lisa is tending her orchards. Her gardens of vivid flowers and abundant fruit remind her that the future is always ripe with possibilities.
Read her monthly online magazine about travel, dance, writing, culture, health, and inspiration at https://www.lisaalpine.com