Books Editor: ‘Travel Writing Is Among the Trivial Genres’

Last week on World Hum, Thomas Swick blogged about the Key West Literary Seminar, which took place earlier this month and featured Pico Iyer, Tim Cahill, Barry Lopez, Kate Wheeler and other writers talking about travel writing. We thought that would be the last we heard of it. But on Sunday, his colleague at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Books Editor Chauncey Mabe, wrote a column about the event. Mabe was, to put it mildly, unimpressed. Iyer and Cahill “offered opposing examples of the way writers can make fools of themselves in talking extemporaneously.” Lopez spoke “in tones not heard since Moses descended the mount.”

Mabe doesn’t seem to care much for travel writing, either. He writes:

Indeed, the writers even hinted at what became obvious to any attentive listener, which is that travel writing is among the trivial genres. Apart from self-discovery and a cool lifestyle for the writer, what do these journeys and the resulting verbiage mean? More than one writer implied that only by crossing the frontier to journalism does travel writing gain heft. “There is a nobility about making the effort to be a witness” to a troubled world, Wheeler said. “All good writing is reporting,” added Eddy Harris.

Mabe drops the subject of travel writing there and wonders (via a question he posed to Iyer) about the morality of travel these days, “in an age of global warming, social unrest and terror.”

Note to self: If you ever finish that travel book you’re working on, don’t send it for review to the Sun-Sentinel.

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