Travel Blog: Life of a Travel Writer
Travel Writers’ Festival in Minneapolis
by Jim Benning | 03.28.06 | 9:47 AM ET
From May 5 to 7, The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis will host a travel writing festival featuring workshops and discussions led by a dozen veteran writers and travelers. Among the participants are several writers familiar to World Hum readers, among them: Jason Wilson, series editor of Houghton Mifflin’s “The Best American Travel Writing” and a World Hum contributor, who will deliver the keynote address; World Hum books editor Frank Bures, who will lead discussions Saturday and Sunday entitled “See the World and Write About It”; and Catherine Watson, author of “Roads Less Traveled” and the former travel editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Watson wrote Incident in a Spanish Church and was recently the subject of a World Hum interview. A complete festival schedule can be found here.
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Yahoo! BuzzBradlee Heading for “The Slot”
by Michael Yessis | 03.23.06 | 1:04 PM ET
We’re not usually in the business of teasing a travel story that hasn’t been written yet, but this looks like it will be a good one. According to Editor and Publisher, Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post editor who stood with Woodward and Bernstein during the Watergate saga, has been commissioned by the New Yorker to write a story about cruising with his son, Quinn, through the South Pacific waters where he fought during World War II.
Does Travel Put a Strain on Travel Writers’ Relationships?
by Jim Benning | 03.20.06 | 12:57 PM ET
At Written Road, Jen Leo asks travel writers just that. Most commenting so far suggest they’re making it work.
John Cusack’s Next Role: Travel Writer
by Michael Yessis | 03.20.06 | 12:57 PM ET
The short news item isn’t online, but Entertainment Weekly reports that he will play an “inquisitive travel writer who investigates a notoriously creepy hotel room.” It’s adapted from notoriously creepy writer Stephen King’s short story “1408.” Let’s hope it’s a return to form for Cusack, who hasn’t been in a movie I’ve cared about since the excellent adaptation of Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity.”
Interview with Guidebook Writer Joe Cummings
by Michael Yessis | 03.20.06 | 11:04 AM ET
Joshua Berman recently spoke with the prolific “travel guru” for Transitions Abroad.
Interview with Karl Taro Greenfeld
by Jim Benning | 03.15.06 | 12:53 AM ET
The author of “China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic” fields questions from Rolf Potts. Among the highlights is his recollection of freelancing travel stories, along with another writer friend, to high-paying Asian in-flight in the early 1990s: “We systematically wrote our way through all the different quaint topics: tea ceremony, Japanese slippers, Thai kickboxing, Sumo wrestling, all the cliches—and tons of little travel stories, but we were bad: we would sometimes write travel articles about places we had never been—and then just crank the stuff out. It was like vocational training for magazine hacks.”
Rolf Potts in New Orleans: A Visit to the Lower Ninth Ward
by Michael Yessis | 03.14.06 | 12:46 PM ET
Crass as it might seem, Potts writes in his latest Yahoo! column, “disaster tourism” is a time-honored travel tradition. “Thomas Cook started taking British travelers on tours of American Civil War battlefields in 1865; a couple years later, Mark Twain and his cohorts famously toured the war-torn city of Sevastopol (where Twain chided his travel companions for carrying off armfuls of shrapnel as souvenirs),” Potts writes. And a lot of travelers are now heading to the Lower Ninth Ward, the district in New Orleans that took the brunt of the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina last year.
Bullfighting School: ¿Quién es Más Macho?
by Jim Benning | 03.13.06 | 12:50 PM ET
I don’t talk about this much because, frankly, it just intimidates people, as it should. But back in 1998, when I was but a young magazine freelancer with a dog-eared copy of Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” on my bookshelf, I enrolled in bullfighting school. The California Academy of Tauromaquia in San Diego, to be specific. That’s me in the photos. It was for a story for Men’s Fitness magazine.
I studied the art of bullfighting for several weeks, learning the ins and outs of cape-handling, among other essentials. For homework, I studied episodes of the TV show “When Animals Attack.” And then, wearing the traditional white shirt and cap of a bullfighting student, I stepped into a stone bullring in Mexico under a hot desert sun (actually, it was rather cool, but “hot” sounds more unforgiving; stick with me here), and went mano a mano with a snarling, charging 400-pound heifer. I graduated with honors.
Before any of you send angry e-mails: Not only did I not harm the animal, but at the time, I was a vegetarian who wouldn’t go within 10 feet of a Big Mac, so send your notes elsewhere. But I digress. I bring this up now because Gadling just pointed out a recent New York Times story in which the writer attended the same bullfighting school and faced a 300-pound heifer.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Three hundred pounds? That’s it?
Exactly. That’s the first thought that ran through my mind.
Back in the day, if you wanted to prove yourself in the ring and deliver a meaty story to your editors, you made sure you faced at least 350 pounds of lumbering beef. Know what I’m saying? And honestly, if you were an editor worth your salt, you wouldn’t print a bullfighting story by a writer who faced anything close to 300 pounds. At the New York Times, you’re just giving more ammunition to those in Red America who claim the liberal media elite are out of touch. Don’t you editors know your heifers? Get back in touch. We need you. No bull. Okay, a little bull.
As for the California Academy of Tauromaquia, it offers an excellent bullfighting education, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in learning the basics. And really, shouldn’t we all know at least the basics? No? Okay.
“Translating Genocide”: MTV Goes to Africa
by Michael Yessis | 03.11.06 | 6:19 PM ET
Looks like MTV beat Nicholas Kristof to the punch. Sunday at 11 a.m. ET it debuts Translating Genocide, a documentary featuring three college students who, after being denied entrance to Darfur, travel to Chad to report on regional violence and human rights abuses. In a review in today’s New York Times, Ned Martel writes that the program “can’t be accused of an encyclopedic understanding of the crisis, nor does it instill a this-could-happen-to-you fear. But genuine emotions are captured on tape as respectful visitors empathize with traumatized refugees. ‘The world really is kind of small,’ one of the students says, mid-epiphany about mutual tastes in music.”
Nicholas Kristof: I Want You to Travel With Me to the Developing World
by Michael Yessis | 03.10.06 | 12:28 PM ET
The New York Times columnist known for his reporting from some of the world’s most deadly and horrific places is looking for a traveling companion. “Over the next month, I’ll be holding a contest to find a university student or two to accompany me on a reporting trip to the developing world,” Kristof writes in his pitch on the Times Select section of the paper’s Web site. “I’m not sure where yet, and that will depend partly on what’s in the news at the time. But to give you a sense of the kind of travel I’m thinking of, the possibilities include a jaunt through rural Burundi and Rwanda in central Africa, or an odyssey from the coast of Cameroon inland to the heart of the Central African Republic.”
Rick Steves: “I’m Just a Travel Writer Trying to Get More Horse Power”
by Michael Yessis | 03.08.06 | 1:56 PM ET
He’s already got a lot of it, of course. An AP profile of Rick Steves this week covers his publishing business and television shows, and details the success and future plans for his new hour-long radio show. Steves says he hopes it will be the travel equivalent of Car Talk. He’s apparently well on the way. The show set a new record for Saturday afternoon listeners during its public radio debut in Seattle, and is now in 17 markets and counting.
Pico Iyer on the Tricks of the Travel Writing Trade
by Jim Benning | 03.06.06 | 2:54 PM ET
Podcast Interview with Joshua Davis
by Jim Benning | 02.27.06 | 12:56 PM ET
Gadling has posted a podcast interview with Joshua Davis, author of The Underdog: How I Survived the World’s Most Outlandish Competitions.
Bernard-Henri Lévy to Garrison Keillor: Bring it On!
by Michael Yessis | 02.20.06 | 12:03 AM ET
Swart: “Ironically, Travel Literature Doesn’t Cross Borders Easily”
by Michael Yessis | 02.16.06 | 12:31 PM ET
It doesn’t? That’s news to me. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Genevieve Swart makes the odd statement in relation to the lack of praise for Tim Moore’s travel books in an otherwise straightforward profile of three “stand out” travel writers: Moore, Eric Hansen and Jan Brokken. Each writer talks about how he got his start in the business, the difficulties of sustaining a career, and the evolution of travel witing.
