Travel Blog: Life of a Travel Writer
How to Tell a Travel Story
by Michael Yessis | 01.26.02 | 1:28 AM ET
Mary Lou Weisman offers a detailed lesson on the best ways to tell your travel tales in a Savvy Traveler audio postcard. “If you’re not willing to get out there in the middle of the living room and actually show how you tripped over the gondolier’s oar, fell into the canal, and came up with a bit of prosciutto behind your ear,” she says, “then forget it.”
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Yahoo! Buzz“Travel Writing is not a Week of Wine Tasting on the Rhine”
by Jim Benning | 01.18.02 | 1:54 AM ET
Jeffrey Taylor, Tim Cahill, Ian Frazier, Pico Iyer and Susan Orlean are among the writers featured in Houghton Mifflin’s The Best American Travel Writing 2001. Any collection that claims to feature the best invites criticism, of course, and we could quibble with a few of the selections, but there’s much to celebrate. Iyer’s eloquent, often re-printed “Why We Travel” essay and Orlean’s memorable take on Thailand’s Khao San Road appear here, and Paul Theroux’s impassioned introduction offers one of the best definitions we’ve read of the kind of travel writing we love: “Travel writing. . .is not a first-class seat on an airplane, not a week of wine tasting on the Rhine, not a weekend in a luxury hotel. It is not a survey of expensive brunch menus, a search for the perfect margarita, or a roundup of the best health spas in the Southwest. In short, it is not about vacations or holidays, not an adjunct to the public relations industry. . . . Travel writing at its best relates a journey of discovery that is frequently risky and sometimes grim and often pure horror, with a happy ending: to hell and back. The traveler ends up at home and seizes your wrist with his skinny hand and holds you with his glittering eye and relates his spellbinding tale.”
“They Can’t Understand That it’s Impossible to Cook a Steak Medium-Rare in a Convection Oven”
by Michael Yessis | 01.16.02 | 1:59 AM ET
USA Today’s Jayne Clark conducted a Q-and-A with writer, flight attendant and former Salon travel columnist Elliott Hester about his new book, Plane Insanity: A Flight Attendant’s Tales of Sex, Rage and Queasiness at 30,000 Feet. “Every flight has a personality, and every destination has a personality within that,” he says. “On a Chicago to Des Moines route, I guarantee about every flight is going to be smooth as pie…You fly between New York and Miami, it’s different.”
Celebrating the Life of Mark Twain
by Jim Benning | 01.15.02 | 2:27 AM ET
If Mark Twain is the father of the American novel, as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner have claimed, then he is also arguably the father of American travel writing. PBS tonight airs the first in a highly anticipated two-part Ken Burns documentary on Twain’s life. Meanwhile, USA Today travels to Twain country to mark the occasion.
Why He Travels
by Michael Yessis | 01.15.02 | 1:24 AM ET
Marty Leshner weighs in with a short essay about the many reasons to hit the road. “Travel,” he writes in the Dallas Morning News, “is as much about who we are as it is about where we are.”
Following Graham Greene
by Michael Yessis | 01.12.02 | 2:28 AM ET
David Wallis recently interviewed Julia Llewellyn Smith about her new book, Traveling on the Edge: Journeys in the Footsteps of Graham Greene. “I don’t think I would like Graham Greene at all if I met him,” Smith says in a Washington Post Q-and-A. “He was manipulative. He was selfish. He was definitely misogynistic. His women characters are appallingly portrayed. But it was his quality of writing that I liked, and his ability to convey the atmosphere of these extraordinary places.”
Reflections on Hesse, Home and the Call of the Road
by Jim Benning | 01.10.02 | 2:35 AM ET
Paul Bateman returned home from 18 months of mind-expanding world travel years ago only to feel lost, uneasy and homesick for the road. He wrote desperate letters, hundreds of them, to travelers he had met, expressing doubt and confusion. One sent back a copy of Hermann Hesse’s Wandering. In today’s Melbourne Age, Bateman eloquently recalls the book’s effect on his life and meditates on the many meanings of home. “When I read this little book,” he writes, “I fell in love with a simple idea and vowed that I would live by it: I was a nomad, not a farmer; I would escape to the world ‘that they steal me away from’; I would flee back home ‘down a thousand close paths’; I would take to the road once more. Except that I never did.”
How to Point in 73 Different Languages
by Michael Yessis | 01.07.02 | 2:42 AM ET
San Francisco Chronicle columnist John Flinn has a problem with those guidebooks filled with cartoon representations of hamburgers and hospitals and such, thus reducing international encounters to point-and-smile moments void of any embarrassing (or meaningful) interaction. “I loathe these booklets,” he writes. “My idea of interacting with people and making new friends is not pointing at little cartoon images of things I expect them to fetch for me.”
Is Travel Writing a Debased and Exhausted Genre?
by Michael Yessis | 11.21.01 | 9:22 PM ET
Jason Cowley didn’t waste any time bashing travel writers in a recent issue of the New Statesman. In his review of Helena Drysdale’s “Mother Tongues: Travels Through Tribal Europe,” he launches into a blistering critique in the first sentence. “Travel writing is, on the whole, a debased and exhausted genre,” he writes. “Most modern travel books are truth-free zones, in which acts are never allowed to interrupt a good story, dialogue is recollected in tranquillity and thus unconvincingly burnished, and imaginative fancy is irresponsibly indulged.” He supports his points with references to certain recent books, and we reluctantly agree that self-indulgence and laziness have crept into some modern travel writing. But we reject his rejection of the entire genre. Modern travel writers are grappling with an evolving, ever-shrinking world. As we struggle with how to navigate and interpret our new landscape, sometimes we’ll float a few duds, perhaps like the ones Cowley points out. But we’ll also turn out worthwhile voices of strength, experimentation and imagination. Stretching the narrow limits of what Cowley deems exemplary travel writing isn’t a literary crime. It’s a necessity. After all, if we all stayed confined within our own borders, that would mark the real demise of travel writing.
Travel Editors Rethink Post-September 11 Stories
by Michael Yessis | 10.26.01 | 8:44 PM ET
Budget vs. Bourgeois
by Michael Yessis | 06.28.01 | 11:43 PM ET
Lisa Anne Abend has traded crowded buses for taxis, youth hostels for hotels she used to deem decadent. Meals of bread and cheese are student-travel memories; she now reserves tables at fine restaurants. Do these changes make her travels less ‘real?’ She adds her two cents to the ‘What makes for authentic travel?’ conversation in a New York Times essay. Abend offers insight into the evolving mind of a longtime traveler, and fills the page with some charming, vivid anecdotes: “I remember a long hike from the bus station into one Greek town (having brushed off the clutch of waiting taxi drivers) that took me past groves of olive trees at harvest time. After stopping to watch one family at work—the men beat the trees with long sticks, the women and children collected the fruit that fell—I asked if I could help. The two hours that followed were perhaps the most memorable of my trip; the swig of ouzo that one man offered me as I prepared finally to leave still burns in my mouth.” Note: After June 30 the story will be available only in the New York Times archives.
Has Travel Writing Become Journalism’s Tiramisu?
by Michael Yessis | 06.14.01 | 8:58 AM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick argues so in the May/June Columbia Journalism Review. Most newspaper and magazine writing has become boring and empty, he writes, distilling travel into “nothing more than a series of negotiable transactions.” Right on.
The things that drive us to risk exposure to armed rebels or five-hour delays at O’Hare are often the things missing from newspaper and magazine travel stories. We’re treated to ‘quaint’ places and ‘rustic’ places and stories containing variations of the phrase “my husband, Ken, and I,” but what about the people you met who caused you to see things in a different way? What about transcendence? What about seduction? It’s honest interaction between people and cultures that entices travelers, and, in turn, readers.
“We learn through human contact, and the knowledge that we gain is of infinitely greater value than any number of practical tips,” writes Swick. “Enlightenment and love—there are no more compelling reasons to travel, or write about it.”
Nightstand Reading
by Jim Benning | 06.05.01 | 12:01 AM ET
As a 22-year-old traveler in Afghanistan, Brad Newsham wondered what it might be like, one day when he was rich, to invite a stranger back to America for the trip of a lifetime. Newsham never became wealthy by American standards, but decades later, he decided to find out anyway. In Take Me With You, Newsham hits the road in search of the perfect candidate, passing through the Philippines, India, Tanzania and other developing countries, encountering a host of memorable characters. This isn’t your typical went-there, did-that travel book. Newsham’s account is evocative and heartfelt, infused with a generous spirit capable of inspiring even the most jaded traveler. “I felt I’d moved a notch or two up the scale of involvement—from observer to participant,” Newsham writes. “Around any corner I might bump into someone whose life, and my own too, would be forever changed by our meeting….Possibility itself sat like an imp on my shoulder, whispering, ‘This could be the one.’”
International Herald Misses Mark
by Jim Benning | 06.01.01 | 12:08 AM ET
One of the great joys of global travel is settling into a far-flung coffee shop or teahouse with the day’s International Herald Tribune, always a great read. When I sat down with the paper and a hot, foamy latte on a recent Italian Riviera morning, however, I almost choked on my brioche reading an article about life on Thailand’s Khaosan Road, a popular crossroads for Asia travelers. Writer Seth Mydans correctly notes that places like Khaosan Road, with their bacon-and-eggs breakfasts and Internet cafes, have lost some exotic luster. But he goes too far when he writes: “It is the black hole at the center of a shrinking world where the Age of Discovery has ended, all roads have been traveled, and the words ‘remote’ and ‘exotic’ have all but lost their meaning….The world of travel has been tamed.”
Interview with Don George
by Jim Benning | 05.31.01 | 12:11 AM ET
In founding Salon’s travel section, Wanderlust, in 1997, Don George created a home for the Web’s most ambitious literary travel writing. Quality, however, doesn’t ensure longevity, especially online. Last year, citing money woes and disappointing traffic figures, the online magazine closed the travel section. George has since landed at Lonely Planet. I interviewed him recently for the Online Journalism Review about his new gig, Salon’s travel book and the state of literary travel journalism. “Tales of unforgettable encounters and soul-stretching adventures don’t sell ads,” he says.
