‘Travel Writing: Inner and Outer Journeys’

Every year, writers of narrative nonfiction get together at Harvard’s Neiman Conference on Narrative Journalism to talk about the genre. The event has been going on long enough that the speeches have been gathered into a new book, Telling True Stories. It’s got some great stuff from Tom Wolfe, Susan Orlean, Gay Talese and other writers. But one of the most exciting things is that travel writing makes an appearance as a bona fide subgenre. “Travel writing is one of the oldest forms of our craft,” Bury the Chains author Adam Hochschild writes in an essay “Travel Writing: Inner and Outer Journeys.” Hochschild traces the journey archetype back to the Odyssey, and cites Primo Levi’s The Reawakening and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat as classics of travel literature.

“I’m all for vacation traveling,” Hochschild writes, “but the most interesting travel has nothing to do with cruise lines and restaurants. It involves entry into worlds other than your own.” He laments the influence of advertising dollars on travel publications, but still seems hopeful for the possibility of writing about unusual places, even if the location isn’t even the point. “As writers and readers,” Hochschild says, “we should look for ways that the outer journey can mirror an inner journey. That is not only what good travel writing is about; it’s what life is about.”

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