Travel Blog: Life of a Travel Writer
Talking Travel Writing and Poetic License with Michael Shapiro
by Jim Benning | 02.16.06 | 2:00 AM ET
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Yahoo! BuzzAre You Ready For Some Hot Pundit on Pundit on Pundit Action?
by Michael Yessis | 02.15.06 | 12:41 PM ET
Thomas Swick on Book TV
by Jim Benning | 02.08.06 | 6:03 PM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor and author Thomas Swick will appear on C-SPAN2’s Book TV Saturday at 6:35 p.m. EST. A crew from the cable channel recently interviewed Swick and taped him reading from “Travels with a Book,” an unpublished story about his book tour of the Midwest last summer. Swick made the tour in support of his collection of travel stories, A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler. Readers will recall that Swick was a guest blogger here last month. In 2003, he spoke to us in a World Hum interview.
Franz Wisner on the Writing Life and Honeymooning With His Brother
by Jim Benning | 02.08.06 | 12:44 PM ET
Rolf Potts has posted a terrific interview with Franz Wisner, the author of Honeymoon with my Brother: A Memoir, which came out in paperback yesterday and is in development for a movie. Wisner has a great story. He was left at the altar by his fiancee. (Okay, that part doesn’t sound so great.) He took the honeymoon anyway—with his brother, who never once complained about Franz’s “spooning technique”—and the two decided to travel together for two years. Then Wisner wrote a bestselling memoir about their journey and sold the film rights to Sony Pictures.
JT Leroy is…Laura Albert
by Michael Yessis | 02.08.06 | 12:22 AM ET
The saga of JT Leroy, the celebrated novelist and sometime travel writer who, it turns out, never existed, reached an end of sorts today. Warren St. John reports in the New York Times that a central figure in the hoax has fessed up. The author of the books Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and one infamous travel story about Disneyland Paris is a 40-year-old woman named Laura Albert.
“It’s Really Not That Dangerous Out There”
by Jim Benning | 02.06.06 | 1:15 PM ET
The San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn enjoys perusing the travel-gadget catalogs loaded with items to keep you safe: shirts with secret pockets, siren alarms for your hotel room, germ-fighting airline seat covers. “These catalogs are fun to peruse (and even more fun to make fun of),” he writes in Sunday’s paper, “but I worry about two things: that they foster paranoia in novice travelers, and that they perpetuate the notion that safety and security comes mainly from buying—and lugging along—the right gadgets. Experienced travelers know this, but to those of you just getting started: It’s really not that dangerous out there.” I agree wholeheartedly.
Kaplan: Journalism Can Learn a Lesson from Travel Writers
by Jim Benning | 02.01.06 | 7:58 AM ET
Travel writers don’t get much good press these days, and they aren’t held in very high regard by traditional journalists. When I worked in newspaper newsrooms, I never once heard a fellow reporter rave about a travel story or a travel writer. So it’s noteworthy that the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, which is widely read by journalists of all stripes, features a compelling essay calling on journalists to learn a lesson or two from the great travel writers. “Journalism desperately needs a return to terrain, to the kind of firsthand, solitary discovery of local knowledge best associated with old-fashioned travel writing,” writes Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic. “Travel writing is more important than ever as a means to reveal the vivid reality of places that get lost in the elevator music of 24-hour media reports.”
Rolf Potts on the Key West Literary Seminar
by Jim Benning | 02.01.06 | 7:28 AM ET
The four-day January writing seminar has gotten more electronic ink than any recent travel-writers’ gathering I can recall. Thomas Swick blogged about it here. We noted a newspaper column about it. And now Rolf Potts has offered his own take. He had a grand time, but he had a few critical words, too. “I’d reckon that one weakness of the seminar was a total lack of political diversity among the panelists,” he writes. “At times, the panel discussions came off sounding like another episode of ‘Liberals Being Self-Congratulatory’ (the longest-running show in American letters).”
Passports, Sales Pitches and The Passion of Rick Steves: Notes From the L.A. Times Travel Show
by Michael Yessis | 01.31.06 | 10:23 AM ET
I spent a few hours Saturday afternoon in the company of Fijian guitarists, men in lederhosen, Rick Steves, mariachis and thousands of fellow travelers at the Los Angeles Times Travel Show. The annual gathering took place at the Long Beach Convention Center, where more than 500 exhibitors set up shop to pitch their resorts, spas, cruise lines, books, magazines, countries and other travel-related wares to the masses.
Oprah, Meet Thomas Swick. (He’s No James Frey.)
by Michael Yessis | 01.30.06 | 5:33 AM ET
Getting on “Oprah” is one of South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick’s goals for the year. Some of his other goals? Finish his book “A Million Little Places to See Before You Die,” take a trip somewhere with Angelina Jolie, and start his own travel talk show.
Carl Parkes: “I’m Just Lighting a Candle Over the Corpse”
by Jim Benning | 01.27.06 | 12:35 PM ET
I always enjoy reading Carl Parkes’ Travel Writers Blog, even though I’m pretty sure he thinks we at World Hum and many of our travel-writer friends are deluded about the business of travel publishing. Parkes is a veteran travel writer who offers a perspective on the travel-writing world you’ll see few other places, summarized in his blog’s subtitle, “The Travails of Travel Writing.” In a recent entry, which was classic Parkes, he took issue with USA Today’s recent series of profiles of people with top travel jobs, including Lonely Planet Global Travel Editor Don George. (We blogged about the series.) “There is NOT a hint of truth in any of these profiles, but they continue to feed the public hunger for notion of travel employee as gifted bird,” Parkes writes.
Exploring “The United States of Appalachia”
by Jim Benning | 01.26.06 | 1:34 PM ET
World Hum contributor Jeff Biggers (Family Traveling, Italy’s Dark Heart and Europe from the Passenger Side) has written a new book that challenges stereotypes about America’s Southern mountains. It’s called The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America. Biggers’ national book tour begins Friday at Tucson’s Rialto Theatre with a reading and live mountain music. Anticipating the event, the Tucson Weekly profiled Biggers. The story’s lead is terrific and gets right to the heart of the matter by invoking the “H” word.
Bernard-Henri Lévy Fever: Catch It
by Jim Benning | 01.26.06 | 10:10 AM ET
Lonely Planet’s Don George: Doing What He Loves to Do
by Jim Benning | 01.20.06 | 2:47 PM ET
Lonely Planet’s “rather grandly titled” global travel editor is profiled in today’s USA Today as part of a series on top travel jobs. Reporter Jayne Clark happened to catch him visiting a Northern California spa. Post-treatment, apparently having rinsed the rice bran and plant enzymes from his body, George tells her, a grin crossing his face, “Few people can say that they love what they do, and few do what they love. I’m getting paid for this. Can you believe it?” We can, and we know we speak for roughly 6.5 billion people when we declare: We’re envious. George was featured in a World Hum interview last year.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: a Rock-Star Philosophe in the Footsteps of Tocqueville
by Jim Benning | 01.19.06 | 11:28 PM ET
