Book Preview: To Life in the Small Corners

Watch the news every day, and you see a planet that seems to have blown a gasket -- full of daily activity that just seems senseless, contentious and forbidding. But that's not the whole picture. View the world through the camera lens of Sedona resident/world traveler Carol Scribner, and you get a much more hopeful portrait -- a connection with places far from our own experience, yet somehow universal. Her photos display a heartening mix of cultural diversity and common humanity.

Carol took the pictures featured here -- a small sample of the 180 color shots in her beautiful new book, To Life in the Small Corners, published on her own Butterfly Productions imprint and available this month for online purchase at www.butterflyproductions.info -- over an eight-year period in Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Laos, Mali, Morocco, Namibia, Tibet and Vietnam. And her high-gloss presentation has a higher purpose. Carol is donating profits from the book to the TurtleWill Foundation (www.turtlewill.org; see below), an organization she works with that undertakes medical, educational and economic projects for traditional peoples in the remote -- and otherwise often ignored -- areas she loves, while respecting their cultural traditions.

There's a tendency to think that the societies that benefit from such help are impoverished, a notion that Carol rejects. "I think an impoverished person would be a person with nothing to feed their soul," she explains. "The people you see in the book have plenty to feed their souls. They are very happy people. They are not hungry. They are needful, some of them, but they are well adjusted, effective people, careful in their beliefs in family, work, their homes, their children. TurtleWill supports these people so they can continue to work the way they live. We build schools and make it possible for the children to learn there." TurtleWill also provides remote populations with needed medicines, temporary clinics and hospital treatment; digs wells for water access; and funds cooperatives to teach income-generating skills for greater economic stability.

Tradition and generational continuity are themes that seem to jump out of every chapter as you flip through To Life, an observation with which Carol agrees. Family is central, she says, because "it is about their survival. Family is the core of everything -- their ethics, morality. It's something as we become more sophisticated that kind of feels scattered sometimes. I felt it was something that people need to be reminded of in the book and see it in a small, simple form. Years ago, when our country was first settled, families stayed together. Grandmothers took care of the children so the women could go out to work in the field. That is what's going on in these parts of the world and I think it is really precious and touching."

Carol found one booster she was particularly gratified to hear was also touched by the values expressed in her pictures -- retired CNN anchor Bernard Shaw, who volunteered to write the book's foreword after seeing an early proof. "I was at a chamber music concert on a Sunday," Carol recalls. "I got home, picked up the phone, and on the other end I hear, 'This is Bernard Shaw.' His voice is so cool! And I have to tell you that every time he calls me he says, 'This is Bernard Shaw.'

"So he said, 'I just finished your book, I took it out on my patio, read the whole thing and I just love it. I did a foreword and I want to know if this is what you want.' So he faxed it over; it is not a traditional foreword and it's not lengthy in detail, but I think for this book, it is a perfect foreword. I couldn't even imagine anything better. It is so beautiful and so supportive. He came out to Sedona to visit, and I have one picture of him out here on the deck. I used my little digital camera and the battery was low. So I only got one shot of him outside with the red rocks behind him, but he's here."

Carol and her husband, Larry, a doctor, continue to travel very frequently, but they rarely go to the same places twice, which is how they knew Sedona should be their home. "This was the only place that we kept coming back to," Carol jokes. She and Larry discovered Sedona by accident, when she was still working at her old job in marketing. "I was working on a product launch and I had never done big offsite meetings," she recalls. "But as a special favor they asked. So Larry and I came here for a weekend -- neither of us had ever been to the southwest. No one told us about Sedona or Red Rocks; we only knew our hotel, where we arrived in the pitch of night, pitch black. When we woke up in the morning, what we saw was very special. We came back several times, and then we bought a little house, for coming out once a month, and we thought of this as a town we might retire to -- we did, about five years ahead of schedule. We have been here nine years now."

Where some might be cowed by travel to remote corners, Carol notes that for her, each destination has been "better than we expected. To be exposed to such wonderful people and cultures ... it's always an honor. Once we sat with a lone elephant for an hour and just watched. We actually said 'Thank You' when we left. Whenever we travel, it's an honor to be able to meet these people and see these beautiful places and record them for our memories, so that we can remember what an incredible experience it was." With To Life, we can see exactly what she means.

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TurtleWill Foundation, which will benefit from sales of Carol Scribner's To Life, was founded by Irma Turtle, a one-time executive at the Oglivy & Mather advertising agency. Inspired by Is Anyone Taking Any Notice?, a book by photojournalist Donald McCullen, she founded Turtle Tours to specialize in travel to visit the world's most remote peoples in 1985. Turtle Tours expeditions have given TurtleWill the "opportunity to reach and respond to the needs of populations and communities that would otherwise remain unnoticed, forgotten or unheeded by the rest of the world." The Foundation's Website (www.turtlewill.org) states the tours are "run out of respect and admiration for the tribal peoples visited and their remarkable ability to retain their traditions and heritage despite the incursions of the surrounding modern world." To date, TurtleWill has relationships with tribal populations in Niger, Mali, Ethiopia, Mauritania and India.

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