Tag: Travel Writing
Are Travel Writers the New Poets (Though Not in a Good, Lyrical Way)?
by Tom Swick | 10.24.11 | 2:43 PM ET
iStockPhoto Tom Swick on writers and readers in an increasingly fragmented world
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Yahoo! BuzzR.I.P. Lynn Ferrin
by Eva Holland | 10.24.11 | 7:09 AM ET
The travel writer and long-time editor of the AAA magazine for Northern California died recently at 73. Over at Gadling, Don George has a lovely tribute to his friend and colleague, and to the power of great travel writing:
[Lynn] infused her pieces with the wonder that was at the core of her life’s journey, with the big-heartedness, big-mindedness and sense of limitlessness that graced her days—and that graced all of us who knew her. She brought these gifts to her writing, she dared to reach far and dream big in her stories—she dared to write about the meaning of life. And because she did so, she touched all of us in big, and deep, ways.
This is what we all need to do as travel writers, I think now. We need to dream big, think big, fling out filaments that tie our travels to a wider perspective. Our work matters only as much as we make it matter, and we need to write pieces that matter. We need to honor ourselves and our readers in this way. We need to honor the act of writing and the act of connecting—connecting with the world when we travel, and connecting with our readers when we write. In the same way that we look for the interlocking pieces of the whole, we also need to be those pieces—we need to interlock, article to article, reader to reader, becoming a part of the vast puzzle we seek to understand and replicate.
It’s a high and daunting calling—and thank god for that. Why waste our days aiming low and taking no chances?
World Hum Writers Honored in ‘The Best American Travel Writing 2011’
by Eva Holland | 10.17.11 | 7:01 AM ET
I picked up my copy of the latest in the “Best American Travel Writing” anthology series this week and was thrilled to see some familiar names listed. Four World Hum stories were included in this year’s notable selections: The Roads Between Us: A Journey Across Africa, by Frank Bures; A Pilgrimage to SkyMall, by Bill Donahue; Lover’s Moon, by Pico Iyer; and The Sexual Lives of Sri Lankans, by Hannah Tennant-Moore.
World Hum contributors Peter Hessler and Tom Swick were also included for stories published elsewhere. Congratulations to all.
‘I Was Writing a Guidebook to a Country That No Longer Exists’
by Michael Yessis | 10.10.11 | 9:08 AM ET
Kate Grace Thomas updated the Lonely Planet guidebook to Libya just before the Arab Spring. As the country turned violent, the book was quickly put on hold. Yet Thomas found herself itching to return to Libya. She writes about her experiences in Guernica:
War is not my beat. I knew that. But Libya, somehow, was. I went in December to tell its stories—stories of nascent tourism and marvelous ruins, stories of deserted beaches and drinking sugary tea in the winter wind. And now, there were more stories to tell.
(Via @writinginpublic)
World Hum Contribs Launch VelaMag
by Jim Benning | 10.05.11 | 9:33 AM ET
World Hum senior editor Eva Holland has teamed up with several other writers to launch VelaMag.
The site, whose masthead includes World Hum contributors Sarah Menkedick and Lauren Quinn, will feature writing “by six emerging writers who also happen to be women, and who frequently write about travel or use travel as a lens, frame or motif in their work.”
It launched with a story by Menkedick about Oaxaca called The Revolution.
It looks promising. We’ll be reading.
Fear and Loathing in a Chevy Aveo
by Eva Holland | 10.04.11 | 10:03 PM ET
On the 40th anniversary of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” The Daily’s Zach Baron climbs into a modest rental car and hits the Hunter S. Thompson trail. Here’s the introduction to his sharp and funny story:
Writers only go to Las Vegas for one reason, really. It is our World Series of Poker, except more pretentious. But the process is not dissimilar. You train, get your weight up. A semi-competent feature here, a not-totally-botched essay there, and then, one day, when your editor is particularly distracted, downtrodden or simply in need of something to believe in, you push your meager pile of chips to the center of the table. You look your mark in the eye and bluff. “It is the 40th anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’” you say, your face calm, confident, “and I want to go there, to write a piece on the book, and the American Dream.”
You don’t expect him to say yes. Pitching stories on the American Dream is what writers do when their hearts are empty, their minds blank. It is the equivalent of stalling for more time, throwing a Hail Mary down eight with time expiring, a way to mark your commitment and plucky optimism before admitting defeat and moving on to something with an actual chance of success.
This is part one of a series. I’ll be following along. (Via @alexanderbasek)
Travels Through the Wreckage of Japan’s ‘Triple Disaster’
by Michael Yessis | 09.02.11 | 7:59 AM ET
World Hum contributor Daisann McLane’s Well-Traveled dispatches about her travels to Sendai, Fukushima and Tokyo four months after the 9.0 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster struck Japan has concluded at Slate. It’s an amazing series, powerful and heartbreaking and beautifully written. From the first of three parts, Sendai Rising From the Wreckage:
Even after four months, it’s a mess of Augean proportion: uprooted pine trees, splintered wood beams, crumpled abandoned cars, wooden fishing boats tipped on their side, trying to sail away on a sea of mud. Your first reaction is to throw up your hands in desperation—how on earth do you begin cleaning this up? But the Japanese have passed that shock stage, and have whipped themselves into action: a squadron of earth movers is busy, steadily organizing the endless wreckage into tidy haystack-like hills. “This was the town of Natori.” Akawa-san points over to a spot on the eastern, coastal side of the highway. There’s nothing there but a solitary house without walls, its soggy furnishings and books spilling out the way junk tumbles from an overstuffed closet.
McLane, whose extraordinary writing career has ranged from contributing to Rolling Stone during its heyday to her current spot as the Real Travel columnist for National Geographic Traveler, explained how writing about the triple disaster affected her in an email to friends and colleagues:
The experience overcame me. Those of you who are writers, photographers and editors will understand: Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of an extraordinary story that makes you want to write your heart out. This was one of them.
Elisabeth Eaves Talks Wanderlust on ‘Q’
by Jim Benning | 08.23.11 | 7:36 PM ET
Nice interview with World Hum contributor Elisabeth Eaves on Canada’s public radio interview program, “Q.” She discusses her new book, Wanderlust, and reflects on the women travel writers of yore.
I’ve been listening to podcasts of “Q” pretty regularly since I downloaded the CBC’s iPhone app. It’s a great show. In my book, it rivals NPR’s “Fresh Air.”
What Does it Mean to be a Nomad?
by Michael Yessis | 08.12.11 | 11:26 AM ET
Venkatesh Rao calls herself an “illegible person.” She explains:
My temporary nomadic state is just one aspect of a broader fog of illegibility that is starting to descend on my social identity. And I am not alone. I seem to run into more illegible people every year. And we are not just illegible to the IRS and to regular people whose social identities can be accurately summarized on business cards. We are also illegible to each other. Unlike nomads from previous ages, who wandered in groups within which individuals at least enjoyed mutual legibility, we seem to wander through life as largely solitary creatures. Our scripts and situations are mostly incomprehensible to others.
“Wanderlust” author Elisabeth Eaves calls Rao’s essay the “best thing I’ve read on nomadism since Bruce Chatwin.”
Rao means something else too: As nomads, we become illegible to a system that can’t pin us down by income, residence, or occupation. Governments and corporations begin to see us as either irrelevant or suspicious. I like to think I’ve contributed a little to this subject in “Wanderlust,” when I talk about stationary peoples’ mistrust of the nomad. The great work on this theme is Chatwin’s “The Songlines.”
(Via @ElisabethEaves)
Does Travel Change Us? The Debate Goes On.
by Eva Holland | 08.09.11 | 8:21 AM ET
A few months back, we blogged about a provocative essay by Caitlin Rolls that argued against travel as a life-changing force. Now The Smart Set’s Jessa Crispin has weighed in too, touching on everything from Rolls’ essay to Tony Hiss’ concept of “deep travel” to Crispin’s own early travels.
Debating ‘The Lost Art of Postcard Writing’
by Michael Yessis | 08.03.11 | 2:16 PM ET
Charles Simic laments the dwindling number of postcards arriving in his mailbox this summer.
Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you’re bound to get an email enclosing a photograph, or, if your grandchildren are the ones doing the traveling, a brief message telling you that their flight has been delayed or that they have arrived. The terrific thing about postcards was their immense variety. It wasn’t just the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal, or some other famous tourist attraction you were likely to receive in the mail, but also a card with a picture of a roadside diner in Iowa, the biggest hog at some state fair in the South, and even a funeral parlor touting the professional excellence that their customers have come to expect over a hundred years. Almost every business in this country, from a dog photographer to a fancy resort and spa, had a card. In my experience, people in the habit of sending cards could be divided into those who go for the conventional images of famous places and those who delight in sending images whose bad taste guarantees a shock or a laugh.
He ends his New York Review of Books piece with something World Hum contributor, Mad Libs-style postcard-template maker and campaigner to make handwritten postcards and letters cool again Doug Mack finds off-putting.
That generalization that people who write postcards are, in some nebulous-but-important sense Older—well, it’s probably correct. Almost certainly. And yet there’s also something so reductive about that artfully-drawn scene and its insistence on corralling the postcard-writers into some dusty museum display of a bygone era, as though to write a postcard is to put down one’s shuffleboard stick and scribble some comments about how Truman sure was a good president, gee whiz, before pushing the walker down the hall to the activity room for the 2pm ragtime sing-along.
Come on. Don’t consign the very act of postcard-writing to the nursing home for lost-cause, nearly-dead communication, along with Morse code and the Pony Express. Don’t take pity on postcard writers. To ask for pity, to claim that this is the domain of only the “problem”-ridden “older people”—this isn’t going to do much to make anyone else want to write postcards, either. Lament the decline, sure, but spare me the elegies.
‘Travels With Harley’ and Other Travel Books With Missing Letters
by @worldhum | 08.03.11 | 11:32 AM ET
Last night on Twitter, a fun, silly hashtag made the rounds: #bookswithalettermissing. Naturally a few travel-focused titles popped up, and we’ve collected nine of our favorites:
@Mi_Schu
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pans. Love, friendship, cookery…. #bookswithalettermissing
@evaholland
Travels with Harley: Steinbeck criss-crosses America by hog. #bookswithalettermissing
@inkasrain
Eat, Pay, Love: What really happened. #bookswithalettermissing
@evaholland
Our Ma in Havana: Memoir of Cuban childhood. #bookswithalettermissing
@BrantSmith
The Canterbury Ales…a guide to the finest brews in the land. #bookswithalettermissing
@douglasmack
Notes From a Mall Island. (Somewhat less charming than Bryson’s original book.) #bookswithalettermissing
@douglasmack
Fear and Lathing in Las Vegas. Gonzo tales from the machine shop. #bookswithalettermissing
@BrianOnWine
A Moveable East: Hemingway recalls his years in Paris with a broken compass. #bookswithalettermissing
@Mi_Schu
On the Rod. Kerouac’s other adventure. #bookswithalettermissing
The last time we had this much travel-themed fun on Twitter, we were talking #faketravelquotes.
Meet Heathrow Airport’s New Writer in Residence
by Eva Holland | 08.02.11 | 2:58 PM ET
Novelist Tony Parsons is the latest writer to sign up for a week at Heathrow. According to the Evening Standard, Parsons will “roam around the airport, among passengers and staff, as inspiration for his 13th book which will be a collection of short stories based on his experiences there.”
“The Art of Travel” author Alain de Botton was the airport’s first writer-in-residence back in 2009. We interviewed him about the experience.
(Via @johnleewriter)
The Return of Bulwer-Lytton and More Bad Travel Writing
by Michael Yessis | 08.01.11 | 11:34 AM ET
Love this annual contest, where writers compose an intentionally awful opening sentence of a novel. This year’s winners were announced last week and, as usual, the honorees have given us some dreadful yet hilarious travel writing. My two favorites come from the purple prose category. Mike Pedersen took the top spot with this clunker:
As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue.
Jack Barry’s vision of Los Angeles was runner-up:
The Los Angeles morning was heavy with smog, the word being a portmanteau of smoke and fog, though in LA the pollutants are typically vehicular emissions as opposed to actual smoke and fog, unlike 19th-century London where the smoke from countless small coal fires often combined with fog off the Thames to produce true smog, though back then they were not clever enough to call it that.
Clever, Jack. Clever.
Do you yearn to write bad travel writing? We can help.
Greetings From _________
by Doug Mack | 07.27.11 | 4:59 PM ET
Keep in touch the easy way with Doug Mack's all-purpose postcard template
The Book Passage Travel & Food Writing & Photography Conference Turns 20
by Jim Benning | 07.22.11 | 2:30 PM ET
I’ll be back on the faculty at the Book Passage Travel & Food Writing & Photography Conference Aug. 11-14 in Corte Madera, California.
Amazingly, the conference turns 20 this year. It has evolved in the digital age, to be sure, but it continues to be a four-day celebration of storytelling—a summer camp of sorts for wanderlust-prone travel and food writers and adventuresome photographers. I’ve met alumni who insist those four days changed their lives. Many return year after year.
What I love most about the conference, besides the fact that it takes place at a great Bay area bookstore, is that it brings faculty and students together during days for instruction and during evenings for meals, wine and conversation. There’s karaoke on Saturday night. I’m convinced the formal and informal gatherings are equally valuable.
This year’s faculty members include conference chair and editor extraordinaire Don George; Outside magazine founding editor Tim Cahill; “An Irreverent Curiosity” author David Farley; San Francisco Chronicle Travel Editor Spud Hilton; Los Angeles Times Travel Editor Catherine Hamm; Afar magazine Executive Editor Julia Cosgrove; Travelers’ Tales co-founder Larry Habegger; veteran photographer Robert Holmes; photographer and World Hum contributor Jeff Pflueger; and many, many others.
I’ll be co-teaching an online writing and blogging track with writer and ukulele evangelist Pam Mandel. We’ll cover both narrative writing and not-so-narrative blogging. We’ll dip our toes into multimedia waters, too. It should be good fun.
Happy Third Birthday, Restless Legs Reading Series
by Jim Benning | 07.14.11 | 11:49 AM ET
I was happy to find myself at New York City’s Lolita Bar last night for another installment of the Restless Legs Reading Series. As usual, it was a good evening: About 50 travel writers and readers chatted around the bar before heading downstairs to hear Tony Perrottet and Elisabeth Eaves read from their new books.
As it turns out, the reading wasn’t just another date on the Restless Legs calendar. It was the series’ third anniversary.
David Farley had been organizing informal gatherings for years, but in July 2008 he decided to make the events official. He envisioned Restless Legs as “a reading series for the wanderlust stricken” that brings “travelers, travel writers, and the people who love them together for an evening of sharing tales from the road, gossiping, and general debauchery.”
He expected a good turnout for the first event: It was mentioned in local media and on travel blogs, and he invited all his friends. Lolita Bar’s little basement was packed as Tony Perrottet and Cullen Thomas read and answered questions. Farley was pleased, but he wasn’t necessarily optimistic about future readings.
“I thought by the fourth month it’d be dwindling to a handful of people, because that’s how a lot of readings are,” he says. “But after almost three years of doing it seven to nine times a year, I’ve been really surprised that it’s been almost full capacity every time.”
What are some highlights from the last three years?
“People who’ve done things other than read,” Farley says. “Mike Barish did 10 minutes of travel-themed standup comedy. Kim Mance sang a travel article that she wrote, accompanied by an acoustic guitar. David Grann read. He’s one of my favorite writers and he’s a pretty big deal.”
We teamed up with Farley for a World Hum-themed reading in October 2008.
The readings are the focus of the gatherings, but I suspect many come as much to hang out with like-minded travelers and writers. In fact, some wind up at the bar all evening and never make it downstairs for the reading. Farley thinks that’s a little disrespectful to the readers. “But then when I think about it, I’d like to be up there sometimes, too,” he says, “so I can’t give anyone a hard time about it.”
How long will Restless Legs continue?
“Who knows?” Farley says. “There’s no termination date. I think people really like it. if I decide to end it, someone else would start something similar. If I somehow perish, someone will decide to keep it going.”
Upcoming readers will include Dan Saltzstein and Brook Wilensky-Lanford Sept. 15, and contributors to Slate’s Well-Traveled series in November.
Long may you run, Restless Legs.
Travels With Byliner
by Michael Yessis | 06.22.11 | 12:10 PM ET
There’s been a lot of positive buzz around Byliner since it published Jon Krakauer’s takedown of Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Deceit. It got another wave of adulation this week as it debuted its first curated batch of nonfiction features and a Pandora-style story-recommendation engine. Jennifer 8. Lee called it a “a beautiful IMDB for writers.” Nieman Journalism Lab called it a “nonfiction nerd’s fantasy.”
I call it the lovely monster that just ate half my morning.
I just took a dip and, wow, it was tough to extract myself to get some work done. I found many compelling stories, including a section with links to more than 1,500 travel stories.
Happy to see World Hum represented. Two stories from the archives are among those included: Karl Taro Greenfeld’s Hope and Squalor at Chungking Mansion and Rolf Potts’ Where no Travel Writer has Gone Before.
Christopher Hitchens Remembers Patrick Leigh Fermor
by Jim Benning | 06.15.11 | 1:01 PM ET
Christopher Hitchens recalls the legendary travel writer who died last week at 96.
Now the bugle has sounded for the last and perhaps the most Byronic of this astonishing generation. When I met him some years ago, Leigh Fermor (a slight and elegant figure who didn’t look as if he could squash a roach; he was perfectly played by Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight, the movie of the Kreipe operation) was still able to drink anybody senseless, still capable of hiking the wildest parts of Greece, and still producing the most limpidly written accounts of his solitary, scholarly expeditions.
And finally:
To his last breath, he remained curious and open-minded to an almost innocent degree and was a conveyor of optimism and humor to his younger admirers. For as long as he is read and remembered, the ideal of the hero will be a real one.
R.I.P. Patrick Leigh Fermor
by Jim Benning | 06.10.11 | 9:58 AM ET
Reports are trickling in that Patrick Leigh Fermor, one of travel writing’s greats and the author of “A Time of Gifts,” has died at 96.
In a 1996 profile of Leigh Fermor in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane argued that the writer lived one of the most compelling lives of the 20th century—so fascinating, in fact, that it makes the rest of our lives “laughably provincial in their scope.”
We fret about our kids’ S.A.T. scores, whereas this man, when he was barely more than a kid himself, shouldered a rucksack and walked from Rotterdam to Istanbul. In his sixties, he swam the Hellespont, in homage to Lord Byron—his hero, and to some extent his template. (He once hunted down a pair of the poet’s slippers, “their toes turning up at the tip,” in Missolonghi.) In between, he has joined a cavalry charge, played a game of polo on bicycles outside a Hungarian castle, observed a voodoo ceremony in Haiti, and plunged into a love affair with a princess. He has feasted atop a moonlit tower, with wine and roast lamb hauled up by rope. He has dwelled soundlessly among Trappist monks. He has built himself a house on the soutehrn coast of Greece, where he still resides. He has written seven travel books and a novel, though which is which one cannot readily say, for the travel books pass from fiercely empirical to the fantastic without drawing a breath.
Leigh Fermor’s book, A Times of Gifts, made our list of the top 30 travel books of all time. Tom Swick wrote of the book:
This is a glorious feast, the account of a walk in 1934 from the Hook of Holland to what was then Constantinople. The 18-year-old Fermor began by sleeping in barns but, after meeting some landowners early on, got occasional introductions to castles. So he experienced life from both sides, and with all the senses, absorbing everything: flora and fauna, art and architecture, geography, clothing, music, foods, religions, languages. Writing the book decades after the fact, in a baroque style that is always rigorous, never flowery, he was able to inject historical depth while still retaining the feeling of boyish enthusiasm and boundless curiosity.