AUGUST 2, 2012- "Happy Campers: The Great Outdoors"

Linda Cross spent her early years on a farm in Southwest Missouri. She attended the University of Arkansas. She has worked at the Campbell Soup Company (11 years) and for the U.S. Postal Service mostly as a letter carrier (33 years). She is now retired. Linda is a traveler. She has been to over 20 foreign countries including hiking the Swiss Alps, the Isle of Skye in Scotland, Milford Track in New Zealand, Mount Kilimanjaro. She's hiked the Grand Canyon 11 times. On top of all that hiking, she has ridden her bicycle across Iowa.

Tucson writer Molly McCloy holds an M.F.A. from The New School and has won two Moth Story Slams. Her work has been published in Nerve, Swink, and Slate. Find out more at www.mollymccloy.com.

Martha Retallick was born and raised in Pennsylvania and earned an economics degree from the University of Michigan. She has worked in all sorts of jobs since then; everything from digging ditches to writing press releases, running cash registers to annotating academic books, repairing bicycles to helping produce a magazine.

In 1980, Martha set the goal of bicycling in all 50 of the United States. Along the way, she met such on-the-road challenges as traversing the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains and the Southwestern deserts. She also experienced many off-the-bike adventures, including a visit to former President Jimmy Carter's residence.

After 12 years and 15,000 miles, Martha bagged her 50th state, Nevada, in October 1992. Since then, she has focused on 'round town, utilitarian cycling. (She has never owned a car.) Nowadays, she rides to Tucson's community radio station, KXCI-FM 91.3, where she is Deejay Martha Jean.

Martha supports her bicycling habit through work as a freelance designer, photographer, and writer. One of her recent self-promotions, Bike-tography: Combining Bicycling with Photography, was a finalist in the American Advertising Federation's National ADDY Competition. She is a staff writer for FreelanceSwitch.com, and is the author of a soon-to-be-published book, Finance for Freelancers.

At first glance it would appear Jim Lipson has trouble holding onto what his mother would refer to as a “real job.”  Musician, counselor, yoga teacher, freelance writer, lobsterman, disc jockey, concert promoter and chronic do-gooder are all present on his resume.  To pacify his mother however, he has also been a fixture with Pima County/College Adult Education these past 22 years. A minor local rock and roll celebrity, he currently lives a not so quiet life with his wife, teenage step-daughter, three cats, two dogs and two guinea pigs.

Josh Wheeler is headed the wrong way to Iowa.

Eliza Weeks was born into the spiked saguaro arms of the desert twenty-one years ago and has lived in Tucson ever since, with the exception of academic yearlong hiatuses to attend Kenyon College in Gambier Ohio. In the cornfields of Ohio she studies Anthropology and Spanish while cultivating her love of creative writing and people watching in her free time. She also has a great passion of immersing herself in and understanding other cultures. This all began in high school when Eliza began a several year run of volunteering and collaboration with the Amigos de Las Americas program. This has lead her to become very interested in current immigration issues that seem to take center stage in every conversation about Arizona she encounters. Eliza recently returned from a semester abroad in Salamanca, Spain where she learned she had to break beyond her timid exterior to survive among the boisterous and exuberant Spaniards. This summer she has returned to the wonderful Tucson heat and has the pleasure of working as an Intern for Story Arts Group and enthusiastic timekeeper for Odyssey storytelling events.

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Adam C. Hostetter has been a producer with Odyssey since 2008, when his therapist handed him Penelope Starr's business card. Better than therapy, Odyssey has introduced him to the bright lights of the stage, many fascinating folks with incredible stories, and the joy of storytelling. Adam has been an adult literacy educator for nearly 20 years. He is also a writer, mining his own queer-and-Mennonite background. He has served on the board of directors for Brethren and Mennonite Council for LGBT Interests http://www.bmclgbt.org/, as well as The Rogue Theatre http://www.theroguetheatre.org/ and StoryArts Group Inc. http://www.storyartsgroup.org/. He grew up in Lancaster County, PA and currently resides in the desert outside of Tucson, AZ.

Curated By Adam C. Hostetter