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3 weeks ago | 
memphismagazine.com | Anna Traverse
A wind advisory is in effect on a cool early-spring day when I visit the Anti-Gentrification Coffee Club, nestled on a quiet stretch of National Street in Memphis’ Highland Heights neighborhood. Leaves skitter down the sidewalk and daffodils shiver, bowing their heads in the bluster.
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3 weeks ago | 
memphismagazine.com | Anna Traverse
Like a lot of kids, I loved coffee’s aroma long before I could stand its taste: bitter, strange, and as off-putting to a young and delicate palate as whiskey, or kale. My parents drank the stuff every morning, without fail: nothing fancy — but then fancy coffee wasn’t really a thing in the ’80s and early ’90s — just dark-roasted beans from the clear-plastic dispenser at Seessel’s.
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1 month ago | 
memphismagazine.com | Anna Traverse
“The sun was coming from outside,” writes Wallace Stevens in the poem “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself.” The sun was coming from outside: not from the crumpled fog of dreams, not from within the mind, but from the piercing clear of dawn. “It was like / A new knowledge of reality.”
Huger Foote, a Memphis-raised artist who now divides his time between this city and New York’s Hudson Valley, seems always to be seeking a new knowledge of reality.
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1 month ago | 
memphismagazine.com | Anna Traverse
In late January, I turned off the news alerts on my phone.
The fact that toggling the notification settings to “OFF” felt like a radical act is a sign of how badly it needed to be done: Not so many years ago, phones didn’t push news alerts to us — they were just … phones — but by early 2025, I was being pinged and chimed and buzzed dozens of times each day by the national media outlets I follow. And I was exhausted.
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2 months ago | 
memphismagazine.com | Anna Traverse
If you walk past India Palace on a clear day, a waft of spices might tickle your nose; inside the dining room, you breathe in the redolence of turmeric, ginger, chili, and much more you can’t discern. But a visit to the kitchen is something else entirely, a new level of delight unlocked for someone, such as me, who has loved this family restaurant for all of its 28 years (and counting).
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2 months ago | 
memphismagazine.com | Anna Traverse
The restaurant business is notoriously, perennially fickle: Tastes change, diners move on, landlords jack rents, profit margins contract or vanish. Still, a report last December from the Memphis Restaurant Association that nearly 100 restaurants had shuttered over the past two years sent a shiver up many food lovers’ spines.
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Jan 1, 2025 | 
memphismagazine.com | Anna Traverse
I’ve never quite understood the fuss over flipping our calendars to a new year; with the possible exception of a big round-number year, like 2000, when we all got to collectively freak out about how our computers might kill us, I mostly see the transition as a bookkeeping detail more than an occasion to become a different version of myself. If I habitually took all the “new year, new you!” marketing to heart, there would be so many versions of Anna Traverse stumbling around by now.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
memphismagazine.com | Anna Traverse
Consuming endless news updates and op-eds may not have any effect on real-world outcomes, but it absolutely affects how we feel about our society, how we interact with our communities, what kind of predetermined grudges we carry into our days.
And so, recently, I’ve found myself seeking out a different kind of narrative: stories that offer small moments of surprise or delight, stories that make me curious about the world rather than eager to hide from it.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
memphismagazine.com | Anna Traverse
As autumn began, Lily Bear — forager, hiker, earth-sniffer, cat-chaser, truck-barker, big floofer, dog of my heart — left this earth. She was 9 years old, we think, give or take. For the last 7 of those years, I got to be her human. She was my best friend, my adventure buddy, my protector. She came to me nervous and traumatized from a difficult situation, and we learned together how to be braver and bolder. I will miss her forever, and love her longer.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
memphismagazine.com | Anna Traverse
The rain had been coming down for three days with no signs of stopping. The basement sump pump was making obscene, house-juddering noises, and the oak tree in the backyard was catapulting wet chunks of itself onto the deck. I needed a change of scenery, but it was too late on a Sunday for a museum trip, too wet for a park walk, and I was too caffeinated to justify a coffee-shop outing.
