Josie Marie Rozell, born thus in iambic trimeter, wanted to be an English teacher at the age of seven.

She was hopelessly bossy, and thought she might thrive in a teaching environment. Also because she loved making popsicle sticks, and writing the names of her stuffed animals upon them to draw out of a mug and demand answers.

Become an English Teacher she did—technically.

Partly educated at Emporia State University in Kansas, partly at Karl Franzens University of Graz, Austria, where she “studied” English and German. But mostly travelled.

God, did she travel.

Cranky buses and budget airlines took her all over.

To Bosnia, to slide her palms against the Stari Most, and almost die on landmine-infested hills; to Romania, to hitchhike seven hours through the Carpathian Mountains with non-English speaking Romanian truck drivers.

To Scotland, where she had lived as a wee lass, this time to love on a gang of 14 Newfoundland dogs in the remote highlands.

To Morocco, to swing along dusty orange-scented roads with pack-fulls of avocados and take stray puppies back to the hostel. To Germany, to cook pizzas blindfolded and climb silos in the middle of the night.

And the more she saw, the more she realized:

There’s so much world.

Such a tiny, speck of a human. An infinitesimal dot on the radar of the Universe. Here today, gone tomorrow.

What to do with such freedom of consciousness?

Josie had to go back to Kansas to fulfill American teaching licensure requirements, and while there (not wanting to be there), she thought to run the LOViT 100 Mile Ultramarathon, in the mountains of Northern Arkansas. She trained. She trained. She trained. Then, 20 minutes before her and her parents got to the start of the race, it was cancelled because of torrential rain.

She cried. She cried. She cried.

Her parents said: Jos, we’ve got nowhere else to be. You could just . . . do it anyways.

So she did.

She ran the sopping-wet LOViT 100-mile ultra in 31 hours. Alone. 70 miles more than she had ever run before.

The world got even bigger for her, when she realized how much world was inside of her to probe around.

She packed it all in a backpack and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia for a teaching internship. She thought: hey, maybe I want to be an English Teacher in Indonesia.

Not the case.

Indonesia was . . . challenging. Brilliant. Sweaty. She realized it was too big for her, this dressing-up-and-being-professional business and teaching according to all these rules; that what she really wanted was to be a writer. A creator of poetry, creative non-fiction, adventure literature. How best to become a writer in these genres than to reward her nomadic soul with exploration?

At the age of 22, she moved to New Zealand. She worked as an au pair for seven months in Auckland and talked her way into a gig as a chef. Then she hiked the South Island from end to end, 1500 kilometers of the Te Araroa in 50 days.

She discovered more worlds, more purpose, more depths of meaning in the beauty of simplified movement. She repacked her backpack and flew to Hawai’i, to work for a year and prepare to cycle from Scotland to Singapore with a mandolin.

She says her favorite occupations are watching clouds pass over the moon and running out of control down steep hills. Her favorite places are the blue cobbled streets of Chefchouen, Morocco and the tussock valleys of central Canterbury, New Zealand.  Her favorite painting is Salvador Dali’s The Elephants .

She can be found working full-time as a Vet assistant in Hawai’i (but mostly thumbing through Google Earth in preparation of this cycle-monster).

She hasn’t won awards, and she’s not sure that she wants to. She just wants to explore. Explore and write.