Travel Blog: Life of a Travel Writer
‘These Are Strange Times to be a Travel Editor’
by Jim Benning | 03.24.03 | 9:15 PM ET
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Yahoo! BuzzWhat’s Alex Garland Doing These Days? Playing Video Games, Mostly.
by Michael Yessis | 02.19.03 | 3:55 PM ET
It has been seven years since Alex Garland’s novel The Beach was published. In that time the book—the tale of a young British backpacker who stumbles upon what appears to be paradise on a small, secluded Thai island—has become a favorite of travelers throughout the world, inspiring a batch of travel-themed tomes that never quite matched the heights of Garland’s literary thriller. (If you’ve only seen the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, by the way, please read the book. The movie got it all wrong.) The success of the book also shoved the then twenty-something writer into the spotlight, which he quickly shied away from.
Recently, though, he gave a rare interview to Andre Paine of the Evening Standard, who reports that Garland has an obsession with video games. “I am not working at the moment,” the now 32-year-old Garland told Paine. “If I am going to write another novel, then I need a good idea and I just have not got one. I am stuck. The last thing I managed to produce was an eight-page comic strip, so I was thinking of maybe expanding that. Generally I do not have any plans to do any writing at all. At the moment I am playing on my X-box an awful lot.”
Tim Cahill to High Schoolers: ‘Book a Trip and Hope for the Worst’
by Michael Yessis | 02.18.03 | 4:04 PM ET
Interview with Alain de Botton
by Michael Yessis | 02.13.03 | 4:22 PM ET
Alain de Botton, author of last year’s highly-praised book “The Art of Travel,” spoke with Terry Gross on the public radio program Fresh Air on Tuesday. The refreshing twenty-minute long conversation—perhaps the longest radio or television interview with a travel book author I’ve heard or seen since we launched this travel media weblog almost two years ago—covered a wide range of travel topics, including de Botton’s book, the lure of travel brochures and how travel expectations are often far different from the reality of experiences.
Adventurer Pelton Recounts Ten-Day Kidnapping Ordeal
by Michael Yessis | 01.29.03 | 10:49 AM ET
Robert Young Pelton, who was recently kidnapped and released by a right-wing paramilitary group in Panama’s Darién Gap while on assignment for National Geographic Adventure, talked about the experience in an interview posted yesterday on the National Geographic Web site. Did Pelton feel like he tempted fate by going to a region known for its high rate of kidnappings and murders? “I tempt fate by going to the grocery store,” he said. “The reality is that there’s no safe activity.”
Pico Iyer: Parasite?
by Jim Benning | 01.29.03 | 10:45 AM ET
Apparently so. The travel writer and novelist might be admired in the West, but in Japan, where he lives, Iyer’s neighbors call him “Isoro,” or parasite. Why? Because when the rest of the men get up and go to work in the morning, Iyer stays home to write. That gem is but one revelation in a profile of Iyer in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.
Backpack Nation Plants its Flag. Long Live Backpack Nation.
by Jim Benning | 01.22.03 | 11:10 AM ET
You’ve got to love Brad Newsham, author of “Take Me With You,” the 2000 feel-good travel book of the year. A year to the day after 9/11, the San Francisco writer announced a plan to dispatch backpackers to give away 10,000 bucks each in developing countries, spreading aid and, more importantly, loads of good karma. He called it Backpack Nation, and it sounded like a pipe dream. Now, Newsham reports on BootBlog, the project is well on its way to becoming a reality. Newsham has established a nonprofit organization and has already collected nearly $7,000. What’s more, he predicts the first backpacker will depart this year.
“I envision that the lore generated by the generous deeds of these ambassadors will capture the imagination of people in every culture, will calm the currently enflamed global conversation, and will foster an era of worldwide peace and prosperity,” Newsham writes. “Stories of wars and violence will be crowded from the front pages by accounts of travelers scouring the world to redistribute wealth and fund miracles-in-waiting.” The project’s Web site has all the details, including information on how to donate and how to apply to become an ambassador.
Interview with Bill Bryson
by Michael Yessis | 01.20.03 | 11:15 AM ET
Does the author of “A Walk in the Woods” and “In a Sunburned Country” get bored with travel writing? “You get bored with anything,” he says in an interview with the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone. “However great it is, you get bored with doing it repetitively. However much you like cheesecake, there is going to come a point when you don’t want another slice.”
Seven Lessons From the Road
by Jim Benning | 01.15.03 | 11:25 AM ET
What do travelers learn when they journey abroad? In a recent column Dallas Morning News Travel Editor Larry Bleiberg, recalls Arthur Frommer’s seven top lessons. At times like these, when so many Americans are shying away from trips abroad, the lessons are “the reasons we must set aside our doubts and go see the world,” Bleiberg writes. Our favorite: lesson seven. Travel teaches humility. “You become a quieter American as a result of travel,” Frommer says, “and in my opinion a smarter and even, perhaps, a more-thoughtful one.” We like that.
Peter Moore: ‘I Can’t Take Travel That Seriously’
by Michael Yessis | 01.14.03 | 11:28 AM ET
Australian writer Peter Moore has been called the “Jim Carrey of travel writing” and the “backpacker’s Bill Bryson,” and he’s the subject of a recent profile in the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s an entertaining little piece. The former advertising copywriter talks about his brushes with danger, his latest book “Swahili For The Broken-hearted” and his next book, which is about a journey through Italy. He says it won’t be anything like the many recent books that romanticize that much-traveled-to country. “I couldn’t write about people sitting around a table getting orgasmic about a tomato,” Moore tells Steve Meacham. “I can’t take travel that seriously. For me, it’s an indulgence.”
Travel Writing is Dead! Long Live Travel Writing!
by Jim Benning | 01.06.03 | 11:46 AM ET
That’s the assessment of Edward Marriott in the January issue of the UK magazine Prospect. Marriott, who has penned two travel books himself, writes that the genre reached “new heights” of popularity in the 1980s with the likes of Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux.
“Now, though, all the paths ahead seem to have disappeared,” he writes. “With many younger writers of travel turning to history, biography or fiction, the genre has never felt so redundant.” The crux of the problem, as Marriott sees it? “In a world where we have difficulty with the concept of authority in general, there is an increasing unwillingness to see the world through the eyes of just one person.”
Does that mean we at World Hum are redundant, too? Consider us happily redundant.
Interview with Paul Theroux
by Jim Benning | 12.20.02 | 3:48 PM ET
Why has the author, whose latest narrative focuses on Africa, described travel as “a sort of revenge?” “We live in a world where anyone can find you at anytime and say, ‘I need your answers for this interview by the 30th,’” Theroux tells Wanderlust. “In Africa you find solitude, and can be inaccessible in an invasive world.”
Interview with Simon Winchester
by Jim Benning | 12.18.02 | 3:58 PM ET
The author of “The Map That Changed the World” tells Lonely Planet’s Don George: “It has been an amazing life. The fact that people thrust money into my hand and tell me to go to exotic places still continues to amaze me.”
The End of the Permanent Vacation
by Michael Yessis | 12.17.02 | 4:02 PM ET
We’ve been following Kate Convissor’s “Permanent Vacation” stories since the day two years ago when she and her family sold everything and hit the road. Last week, after nine stories, the series ended. We’re sad to see it go.
Convissor’s dispatches from throughout North America have been unfailingly honest, entertaining and insightful. She’s also shown just how much impact the simple act of travel can have on a person’s life, as well as the lives around her. In her final story, written several months after the family returned to Michigan, Convissor reveals how her children were affected by their journey. Her son, she writes, has returned with greater confidence and a deeper sense of purpose. She, too, has been permanently changed. “I wanted to be changed,” she writes. “I didn’t want the trip to be simply an 18-month hold ing pattern after which I’d pick up all the balls I’d dropped. I didn’t want to be sucked back into the riptide of rush and hustle, into the jaw-clenching, teeth-grinding, disease-inducing adjectives of the culture I left for a time. I didn’t want to accumulate possessions or meaningless obligations again. So far I haven’t. Part of me simply has not come back from the road, and I hope it never does. I may have lost muscle tone, but I have kept my peace.”
Interview with Thomas Swick
by Jim Benning | 12.06.02 | 3:42 PM ET
Rolf Potts has posted an interview with one of America’s most thoughtful newspaper travel editors, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s Thomas Swick. “As an editor, I try to balance armchair stories with consumer pieces,” Swick says. “People need information, but they also desire narratives. And a section that’s nothing but tips and advice will attract only those people who travel, while there are a lot of people who don’t—for various reasons—but are nevertheless curious about the world.”
