It seems like just yesterday we gave this upstart blogger his big blogging break. (Okay, it wasn’t exactly a break. We had to talk him into it. And with two books under his belt, he’s hardly an upstart travel writer.) Yesterday, South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Tom Swick launched a blog on the Sun-Sentinel’s Web site. His first posts touch on “componetization,” the QE2 and Louis Vuitton’s “journeys” commercial—a fine start.

Related on World Hum:
* Q&A with Thomas Swick: A Way to See the World

Key West is a hard place to leave. (All of the people I talked to—Americans as well as Eastern Europeans—said they stayed during the hurricanes.) Yet I drove away happy to be returning to work. All weekend I envied the authors up on stage, but on Monday I felt blessed, thinking that while many of them would be retreating back into their studies to work on books, I was heading toward a newsroom where calls, e-mails, colleagues awaited. Sunday my story on Bardonecchia, Italy, had run; I wondered how it had been received; by afternoon I’d have the proof of next Sunday’s column. All weekend the speakers had felt important and in demand; now it was my turn. For the more solitary ones, the weekend must have been like a brief foray into the real world—greeting people, making conversation, being sociable—while for me it was an escape from it.

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I visited Key West for the first time in 1991. I had been in Florida, working as a travel editor, less than two years, and driving with the window down in January to a literary seminar on travel writing seemed a dual blessing. John Malcolm Brinnin—another unjustly forgotten writer—gave a keynote address that I still quote from in travel writing workshops (the hair on my neck never failing to rise). I interviewed Calvin Trillin, who invited me to lunch at the Pier House with Alice. And I interviewed Jan Morris, who impressed me as the most considerate famous person I had ever met. (A role Pico Iyer seems to be filling admirably.) One morning near St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, I ran into Jan power walking down Duval Street. No matter; she stopped to chat. I told her that in my travels I often attended service at the local Anglican church. “You can sometimes meet interesting people there,” I said. She looked doubtful, saying she preferred the company of pagans. And with that she regained her loping stride.

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Saturday morning I stepped out of my Key West B&B and felt a chilly breeze. I had often thought that I personally brought unseasonable weather to a place (almost never unseasonably good weather) but now I wondered if it was maybe travel writers in general.

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At some point during the drive back from Key West it occurred to me that I had used a cruise analogy in yesterday’s blog about the literary seminar on Adventure, Travel and Discovery. No wonder I wasn’t one of the invited speakers. 

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Regular World Hum readers will be familiar with South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick. We often link to his columns and stories; we’ve interviewed him; and we’ve enjoyed his two books, A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler and Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland. His 2001 essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, Roads Not Taken, about the dismal state of travel writing in American newspapers, is a must-read for travel writers and editors alike. So when we decided to begin inviting some of our favorite travel writers to be guest bloggers in 2006, Swick’s name immediately came to mind. We’re delighted that he accepted our invitation to contribute all this week.

I’m in Key West; drove down Thursday from Fort Lauderdale for the Key West Literary Seminar on the Literature of Adventure, Travel and Discovery. In the evening Pico Iyer gave the opening address, speaking for 80 minutes without notes and almost without pauses to a packed and dazzled crowd of mostly older citizens. Sketched his story—born in England to Indian parents who then moved to California, currently living in rural Japan—and the themes of his writing—interchange of cultures, traveling for contradictions, travel as a dialogue between a person and a place, an interest in the romance rather than the clash of cultures, etc. Leaving I heard an elderly woman ask her friend, “Did he say he lives in royal Japan?”

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