Dave Eggers on Fiction and Travel and Climbing Kilimanjaro
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 05.05.05 | 10:54 PM ET
In an interview with WeeklyDig.com about his latest short story collection, Eggers talks about drawing on his own travel experiences in his fiction: “I’ve written plenty of stories with characters I don’t know who do things I haven’t personally seen done, but as for locations, I’ve felt odd about guessing or assuming too much. [The story] ’Another’ is fiction, but I did spend a week at the pyramids in 1997, and rode a horse—rented from a very shady guy—through the desert. The pain, because I had no idea how to ride, was real. ‘Up the Mountain’ was based in some part on a trip I took with my wife and brother in 2001. We climbed Kilimanjaro to raise money for cancer research.”