Donna has always traveled the way a reader reads — slowly, attentively, with the sense that something important is about to be said. It began with the Peace Corps and two years in Fiji, where she learned what it means to arrive somewhere as a stranger and stay long enough to understand. That quality of attention never left her. In the decades since, she has carried it to the markets of Cairo, to the ancient streets of the Republic of Georgia and the vast landscapes of Tanzania, to the workshops of China and the museums and back roads of Europe.

The pieces gathered here are not souvenirs. They are conversations — with makers whose names she sometimes knew and sometimes didn’t, whose work she recognized as worth carrying across an ocean. A textile, a small painting, a carved object, a piece of pottery: each one marks a place, a moment, and a decision to support the person who made it. Taken together they are a map of a life spent curious about the world and the people in it.