Catching Up with Rolf
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 06.02.06 | 11:58 AM ET
Travel writer Rolf Potts has been a busy guy lately. Not only has he been contributing to our list of the top 30 travel books of all time, and writing our Ask Rolf column, but he has been turning out columns for Yahoo and interviewing travel writers for his own site, too. Whew. For his Yahoo columns, he recently talked with “River Town” and “Oracle Bones” author Peter Hessler and meditated on our affection for souvenirs. Over at RolfPotts.com, he just posted an interview with Boston Globe travel writer Tom Haines, whose stories we often link to on World Hum. Remarked Haines: “I believe good travel writing, as opposed to foreign reporting, or essay writing, or memoir, or whatever, comes with recreating the experience of place. That is, try to present a complete picture: factual, imagistic, emotional. Try to capture, in other words, the multiple layers of reality of a place. Economics and politics, religion and history are all critical. But so is the way people walk, or talk, or act in a group, for example. So is how the light changes by late afternoon, or the feel of a hot wind from the west.”
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
