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Friday, July 11, 2025

A Lifetime in the Making

Connie Stambush’s “Untethered: A Woman’s Search for Self on the Edge of India” is a memoir highlighting the twists and turns of her solo, five-month motorcycle journey on the edge of India as she attempts to face down and overcome her fears and self-doubt.

“I was a shy kid and kind of afraid, but I didn’t like that part of me,” she says. “I was always challenging myself to try and be braver and overcome fear.”

In 1997, Stambush quit her job and sold off her possessions before traveling across Eastern Europe and the Middle East for two years. She was a feature writer and copy editor at the Prague Post in the Czech Republic, and a stringer for the Houston Chronicle in India. She then took a one-year contract as an editor with the women’s feature service in New Delhi, India. Once her contract ended, she wasn’t ready to leave, so she embarked on her 7,000-mile motorcycle journey.

Though not an easy country to live, Stambush says India was vibrant and thrilling. She left with a completely different understanding of the country from when she first arrived.

“Untethered” is her first published book — she says she knew from the minute her journey started, she was going to write a book about it and what it was like for a woman alone in a country where women don’t travel alone, with countless drafts written over many years as she tried to shape her story.

“Don’t be held back by anyone, least of all yourself,” she advises readers. “We all have our own personal challenges, things that have held us back or things we don’t believe in and I think you can get there, inch by inch, just by having belief in yourself.”

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Jodi Keen
Jodi Keen
Jodi Keen joined Tucker Publishing Group, Inc., in April 2021 as Managing Editor. She previously served as the special publications editor for the Messenger-Inquirer newspaper in Owensboro, Kentucky. A native of Mt. Vernon, Illinois, Jodi is a Murray State University journalism graduate. After college, she spent two and half years in Vienna, Austria, first as an au pair, and then as the publisher’s assistant and events editor for The Vienna Review, a monthly English-language newspaper. Jodi has lived on Evansville’s East Side since 2016 and enjoys reading, walking her German shepherd Morgan, and exploring Evansville. She also serves on the board of directors for Foster Care In the The U.S.

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