Travel Blog: Life of a Travel Writer
Bourdain in Salon: “Watching Beirut Die”
by Michael Yessis | 07.29.06 | 12:04 PM ET
On Wednesday, Anthony Bourdain fielded questions at the Washington Post about his recent experience in Lebanon—he was filming his Travel Channel show “No Reservations” when the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah began. Friday, he wrote a terrific essay about it for Salon. “It’s not what I saw happen in Beirut that I feel like talking about, though that’s what I’m doing, isn’t it?” he writes. “It’s not about what happened to me that remains an unfinished show, a not fully fleshed out story, or even a particularly interesting one. It feels shameful even writing this. It’s the story I didn’t get to tell. The Beirut I saw for two short days. The possibilities. The hope. Now only a dream.” Bourdain’s story has stimulated a flood of letters from Salon readers.
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Yahoo! Buzz2006 Book Passage Travel Writers Conference
by Jim Benning | 07.27.06 | 1:25 PM ET
Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Meeting People
by Tom Swick | 07.24.06 | 6:18 PM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Meeting people: It can sometimes be difficult meeting people—depending on the place (holiday resorts where you don’t speak the language are especially tough) and on your own degree of comfort in approaching strangers. But once you do, it’s easy to talk to them because you’re so well-informed; you’ve read their hometown paper, you’ve watched the films of their great director, you’re curious about the Nobel prospects of their feminist novelist.
The Pursuit of Free Travel: Inside a Year-Long Quest to Win a Trip
by Michael Yessis | 07.24.06 | 8:09 AM ET
Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Venturing Beneath the Surface
by Tom Swick | 07.20.06 | 4:30 PM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Venturing beneath the surface: Having walked and sat you want something a little richer. You’ve observed the surface, and now you want to venture beneath it; you want to participate in the life of the place. You call your contacts. You search for a character or an incident or even a calamity that can become your subject. The worst trips, it is famously said, make the best stories, and, in a kind of proof of that, Vintage published in 1991 an excellent anthology of travel writing titled Bad Trips.
Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Arrival and First Impressions
by Tom Swick | 07.19.06 | 12:10 PM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Arrival and first impressions: Travel writers, when thought of at all, are seen as charmed figures, always moving, never stymied in front of an immigration officer (or computer screen). Travel writers, if we reflect at all, see ourselves as aimless, inconsequential, and nevertheless under-appreciated beings.
Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Pre-Trip Preparation
by Tom Swick | 07.18.06 | 11:35 AM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Pre-trip preparation: As soon as you’ve decided where to go, you start your research. You read the guidebooks, just like a tourist. But you also read history books and novels set in the place. (If it’s a foreign country, read both those by English-language authors—you will not be at this long before you run into Graham Greene—and those in translation.) Travel books are, of course, also important, but stick with the older ones; anything written within the last few years will be too close for your own visit, and you don’t want another person’s impressions coloring your own.
Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Where to Go
by Tom Swick | 07.17.06 | 1:43 PM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Where to go: Only amateurs think that writing begins when you sit down at the computer. The professionals remember Sir Joshua Reynolds who, on being asked how long it took him to do a painting, answered: “All my life.” Travel is a genre of writing that encompasses, not surprisingly, the world: flora and fauna, architecture, language, history, food, music, religion, politics, art. All of a writer’s experience goes into his or her writing; it’s just that travel writers, because of their chosen form, need to experience more than most.
Israel and Lebanon: The Traveler’s Perspective
by Michael Yessis | 07.17.06 | 12:27 PM ET
We often say that we travel and read travel writing to discover more about the world. So this week, we turn our attention to Israel and Lebanon, where a violent conflict shows no sign of letting up. To get a different perspective, we thought we’d link to some of the best travel stories we’ve seen from Israel and Lebanon in recent years. Slate, for instance, had a great Talking Tour of Beirut Well-Traveled feature last year, a five-part series by Lee Smith. Slate also published a story by Negar Akhavi a few years ago about “Hezbollahland,” a place “where Islamic fundamentalism meets Dollywood.” Here at World Hum, we posted Lynn Cohen’s reflective story, Blooming in Jerusalem, and Jenni Kolsky’s excellent photo essay taken on a beach outside of Tel Aviv. She writes: “Here it felt safe, in the moments when life is about the pursuit of pleasure, in the moments when you can forget that you are in the midst of war.”
Inside ‘The Most Schizophrenic Job in All of Travel’
by Michael Yessis | 07.17.06 | 7:07 AM ET
Steve Hendrix calls himself a professional mercenary. His fight? Working as an assistant tour guide on a 14-day European bus tour, a journey he chronicled Sunday in the Washington Post. It’s a great piece of you-are-there journalism. Funny, too. “There are two words that we tour guides hate to hear when checking into Budapest hotels with 30 road-whipped passengers waiting in the bus, all limp from their third change of cities in six days and footsore from hours of sightseeing in 93-degree heat in a country without air conditioning amid a group-dynamic that is just barely propped up by the prospect of a much-anticipated ‘Hungarian feast’ in the hotel dining room an hour from now,” Hendrix writes. “Those words are: ‘What dinner?’”
Want to Be a Travel Writer?
by Jim Benning | 07.12.06 | 12:15 PM ET
Jen Leo has 10 tips to consider. My favorite? Number four: “Read Read Read.” Based on at least some of the submissions we get at World Hum alone, it seems there are writers who would rather skip this step. Dude, total turn-off.
Tahir Shah: Books that Inspire Wanderlust
by Michael Yessis | 07.11.06 | 10:56 AM ET
The author of The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca and other tomes wrote about six books that inspire wanderlust in Sunday’s Book Post section of the Washington Post. Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines made the cut, as did the No. 1 book in World Hum’s recent countdown of top travel books, Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger. Shah writes in his lead that he once met Thesiger in Kenya. It’s a great anecdote.
The Skinny on Eat.Shop Guides
by Jim Benning | 07.10.06 | 1:26 PM ET
While we’re on the subject of travel guidebooks: Business Week just published an AP story about eat.shop guides, a series started in 2003 that, according to the article, “get down to what really matters for a generation weaned on ‘Sex and the City:’ Eating. Then shopping. And then, perhaps, more eating, followed by, why not, a smidgen more shopping.” Jen Leo, among others, likes the approach, telling the AP, “Travelers are looking beyond the basic hotel and popular restaurant—they are looking for a different angle on why they tour a city.”
I Wrote a Travel Guidebook and All I Got Was a Pistol Whipping in Caracas
by Jim Benning | 07.10.06 | 11:58 AM ET
Okay, we exaggerate. Lonely Planet contributor Thomas Kohnstamm, a 30-year-old Seattle native, got more than just a pistol whipping while working on one guidebook. He also spent “massive amounts of time staying in fleabag hotels,” and he surely enjoyed the writing process, which he likened, at times, to “data entry.” Kohnstamm is among those quoted in a recent New York Times story about the challenges and perils of researching travel guidebooks for the likes of Lonely Planet and Let’s Go. Reports Warren St. John: “While the phrase ‘travel writing’ may invoke thoughts of steamer trunks, trains, Isak Dinesen and Graham Greene, or at the very least, well-financed junkets to spas in Rangoon for some glossy magazine or other, writing budget travel guides is most decidedly yeoman’s work. Most who do it quickly learn the one hard and fast rule of the trade: travel-guide writing is no vacation.”
Writer’s Digest on the Business of Travel Writing
by Jim Benning | 07.07.06 | 11:08 AM ET
