1- 2 November 2025 Lviv, Ukraine - Kraków, Poland Larissa and I were introduced by a Ukrainian writer during the first year of the war. I was looking for a way to bring RISE to Ukraine and she was my first point of contact. She’s an American who moved to Kyiv some time ago and made it her home. When Russia began its full scale invasion, she lifted her proverbial middle finger to the approaching army and stayed right where she was. Three and a half years on, she’s still there.

31 October 2025 Lviv, Ukraine No air raids here last night. I do, however, manage to get hit with a cold. I wake up congested with a fever and a sore throat and a curse for the very existence of respiratory viruses. I go to a pharmacy, purchase and consume a huge amount of some sort of cold medicine - I don’t know the details because the labeling is all in Ukrainian - which immediately erases all my cold symptoms and replaces them with tachycardia, and head to rehearsal. Mari

30 October 2025 Lviv, Ukraine The day begins with an air raid. In my jet lagged stupor, I fail to hear the siren. I am woken instead by a text message from Leonid saying there is an attack and I need to come down to the basement shelter. My only experience with air raids is from being in Israel where the tiny geographic area means that from siren to detonation you have at most 90 seconds, so I essentially leap out of bed and hustle down to the basement, seven floors down. Whe

29 October 2025 Lviv, Ukraine Krakow to Lviv. During the entire car ride I nurse a general nausea courtesy of sleeplessness, jet lag, and a dash of car sickness. There are three in the car, and our soundtrack is a maelstrom of Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, and Euro club tracks. It takes several hours to drive to the border and three more to cross it. We are preceded by a caravan of lorries accompanied by police and military vehicles - a delivery of weapons to the fighting lines

28 October 2025 Krakow, Poland I arrive from Los Angeles on an overnight flight that has, through the cunning use of time zones, erased an entire day. Roughly twelve hours of travel has used up twenty four hours of the clock, so that it was evening when I left, and evening when I land. I traverse the airport and arrive where I am staying. It occurs to me that this city, Krakow, Poland, is probably where RISE began. I was here in 2006 when I was twenty one years old. It was my