I’m Writing to Help Our Planet

By Whitney Brown

My favorite thing to write is a travel essay.

That’s because travel writers never take a trip just once. We get to live every excursion over and over: once as we travel, twice as we write, again and again as we revise. At every step, we wring more from our experiences.

But I often wonder how, on a climate-changed planet, I can justify writing about my trips. 

So I bring climate themes into my essays. I feel good about openly addressing the issue.

And yet, on my more cynical days, I doubt that justification is enough. Travel is carbon intensive, and climate change is already hurting people.  

To work through this tension, I’ve turned to books like Barry Lopez’s memoir Horizon. In one memorable passage, he describes swimming with a school of orange-eyed mullet. “Thousands of them moved in unison above me,” he writes, “like a single thunderhead.”

The scene unrolls in barely 400 words, but when I read that lush prose, I feel Lopez becoming one with the ocean.

He concludes, “That minute and a half with the orange-eyed mullet was an experience my body as well as my mind continued to remember. Here, for me, was the edge of the miraculous.”

And here’s the thing for me: I remember that day too. Lopez renders the scene so vividly that I am there. I’m connected to him, the fish, the water.

In Lopez, I find my motivation to write about my travels. I don’t take many ocean swims, but I have my own ways to know the planet and its people better—to love them a little more.

One day, while strolling down a Seattle sidewalk, my husband and I saw a bright orange, hand-knitted rectangle attached to a dowel. The object was tucked into a basket below a crosswalk sign, clearly a flag for pedestrians to carry as they crossed the street. Far from momentous, it was the most moving detail I found on that trip: evidence that someone had wanted to protect their neighbors, to keep their community safe.

Then there was the morning I went jogging in Limerick. I chased a road around a roundabout, crossed a bridge, and entered a green space. I was breathing heavily, scanning the sidewalk in front of me as runners do, when a fox ran across my path. Animal life in an urban environment—a chance encounter that felt serendipitous, a source of pure delight.

And I’ll never forget the November afternoon when rain fell at Arches National Park, clearing the trails of most hikers. I tipped my face to watch water streaming down the cliffs, a view privileged to a few others and me.

So while I write about small, meaningful moments like these in my travel essays, I’ve also researched mangrove trees and Colorado history, examined Indigeneity and privilege, and imagined scenarios beyond my lived experience. My travels and my travel writing have helped me to feel surprised by people, stilled by animals, awed by beauty. Truths come into sharper focus, and the world looks more like a home for interconnected beings.

Now I know this planet better, and I love it more fiercely.

And this is the gift I hope to give to my readers, in the way reading travel essays and memoirs has made a difference to me. By working on my craft, I hope to impart a love for unfamiliar cultures and ecosystems. A love that connects strangers. A love that motivates them to protect people, animals, home—to stand up for the Earth and all of its beings.

This may be idealistic, but I still believe travel writing matters. Especially as the climate is changing.

___ 

Whitney Brown is a travel writer from Utah. Her essays explore the ways that climate change is affecting people and places around the world. She recently received her MFA in creative nonfiction, and when she’s not traveling or writing, she’s usually reading, hiking, painting, or submitting essays to literary journals.

In Favor of Clicking the Submit Button Too Soon

By Kate Langenberg

It was a fairly straightforward challenge: write an essay of no more than 500 words about a vacation gone wrong.

I hadn’t been looking to enter a contest about travel writing. I was just reading the news online like I do every morning and happened to click on the book club section where I found the call for submissions. I laughed a little as I remembered the mishaps my husband and I had had on our honeymoon.

Being adventurous and thinking we were invincible, we had rented a car and driven through northern Italy. The rental, a standard-issue Fiat with front-wheel drive, might have worked out great had we intended to stick to highways and main roads, but that would have been boring, and we were not boring people. Main roads were for tourists who didn’t like to veer off the beaten path. We were determined to veer—which we did, straight into a giant pothole on a dirt-covered, boulder-strewn road that swallowed one of our tires and left our rental car—and our ability to travel to our next destination—in a precarious state.

I whipped up an essay about that experience almost fifteen summers ago: how we ended up with a flat tire that was completely unfixable, and how we had to drive around with a donut recommended for a very limited number of kilometers at low speed. It was a ridiculous situation, considering we were scheduled to drive to Florence in a few days to catch a train heading south. The route to the city—the entire country, really—was full of winding, hilly roads populated by drivers familiar with the terrain and eager to speed through it.

We scrapped our plans, including our day trip to Siena, and made the best of staying close to our Greve hotel, which ended up being a wise and relaxing choice. 

I wrote the essay in the span of an afternoon. I stepped away to walk my dog, returning an hour later to review my word choices and word count and to shorten a few paragraphs. It was a little long, but I liked the story, and I figured if a matter of 100 words would keep the website from publishing it, then it wasn’t meant to be. This was me choosing not to overthink it. I plugged the text into the submission form and sent it off.

Which is exactly what all the advice about writing and editing tells you not to do.

What you’re supposed to do is sit on anything you write and come back to it days, maybe weeks, later. You’re supposed to show it to other people, seek feedback, and not let your eyes be the only ones to read it. You’re supposed to find flaws that you’ll be glad to catch before the people wielding the gavels look it over.

Or, you could trust your gut.

You could listen to the little voice inside your head that tells you what you’ve written is good, and on that instinct, you could hit the submit button without obsessing for days or weeks over a few hundred words.

Of course, this approach might not make sense for every type of essay or piece of writing you create. Some pieces need to marinate; some need more time to come together. But when you have a story that flows easily from mind to page in your signature voice, it might be worth trusting your intuition that it’s good enough to submit because it came together in just a few hours.

As a chronic overthinker, this is not my usual process. I’m one of the people who does spend days and weeks editing and rewriting. I read sentences out loud to my husband, asking him which versions sound better. Sometimes it’s the most minor changes that leave me riddled with indecision.

I wonder, often, how much is too much time spent perfecting my writing? Am I perfecting it for myself or for someone else? The conclusion I frequently reach is that I’m doing it for someone else. It’s more difficult to discern what might appeal to other people, and that’s why my second drafts take so much time. There’s much less guesswork involved when I allow my voice to remain clear and strong instead of pushing it to the verge of something unrecognizable.

I was delighted to learn my essay had been chosen for publication. Trusting my instincts had been the right decision. The essay had come to me readily, and instead of second-guessing myself, I took a chance. I did what felt natural. I veered off the beaten path, hit submit, and this time I didn’t get swallowed by a giant pothole.

___

Kate Langenberg is a writer with a background in trade nonfiction book publishing, journal publishing, and marketing communications. Her essay, La Dolce Fiat, was recently published on Boston.com. She lives in Powder Valley, Pennsylvania. Read more on her website.

36 Hours in Cobblestonia

By Russell Frank

*By early 2020, The New York Times’s 36 Hours column had been running for nearly two decades. The series — one of the Travel section’s longest-running — offers readers a recommended itinerary for a weekend trip in a bustling location…Now, 36 Hours is finally back. – New York Times, Oct. 7, 2022

**With apologies to Stan Mack’s “Real Life Funnies,” every word is guaranteed verbatim from The New York Times, except the name of the town.

With its inventive food scene, excellent beaches and “Night of the Iguana” mystique, Cobblestonia makes the perfect weekend getaway.[1] This urban jewel offers innovative restaurants, gorgeous parks and gardens, and museums that celebrate the area’s many cultures.[2] The many cobblestone, pedestrians-only streets in the town’s historic center give the city an intimacy that belies its population of over 60,000.[3]

In some ways Cobblestonia seems like a city frozen in time: cobblestone streets and clay-tile roofs, men and women in indigenous garb selling fruits and vegetables, and meticulously preserved traditions and relics dating back centuries.[4] Now, thanks to a blossoming creative scene, there are also new, ambitious restaurants and plenty of contemporary art and design to complement the old.[5] A new Cobblestonia is taking shape, and palpable energy is flowing to downtown areas.[6]

In this famously diverse city you’ll find an energetic food scene, vibrant street culture and cocktail wizardry.[7] This scenic city offers quirky museums, outdoor markets, great shopping and a creative food scene.[8] There are also outlying neighborhoods to explore, along with natural wine bars, street art and pop-up markets.[9] Just a 15-minute walk from the cobblestone alleys of the Old City, trendy restaurants and boutiques — even coffee bars that double as late-night performance venues — have blossomed.[10]

The city offers a dynamic cultural landscape, with world-class chefs, design-forward shops and energy to spare.[11] But you’ll also find a rich cultural heritage reflected in traditional temples and shrines, street food and homegrown art.[12] Compact and easy to navigate, Cobblestonia remains underrated despite its picturesque center of cobblestone streets lined with medieval pink-hued buildings, well-preserved Roman sites and dozens of churches.[13]

Beneath the grit, there’s a kinetic urban energy that can be savored in Cobblestonia’s street art, restaurants, music clubs and markets.[14] The cobblestoned district — often compared with Paris’s Montmartre, and where your hotel will likely suggest that you have dinner — is filled with traditional taverns, where bands of five to six musicians move from table to table singing folk songs and taking requests.[15]

This multicultural hub is known for its mild climate, rich culinary and craft traditions, and complex history.[16] The city is filled with art and stunning architecture, but nature, too, is an integral part of urban life.[17] Cobblestonia is laid-back and outdoorsy, but its sophistication shines in its expanding art scene, thriving fashion industry and a new generation of chefs embracing native ingredients.[18]

The city has its own distinctive culinary, wine and cultural scene.[19] There are enough old and new flavors to keep visitors satisfied for a weekend.[20] We found ourselves snapping pictures of the stray (but evidently well-fed) cats that stalk the cobblestone plazas and nap on stone staircases.[21]

Cobblestonia is emerging as a proud city, known for its progressive start-ups, energetic art scene and great dining and coffee.[22] A new generation of chefs is championing locally sourced menus, and a relaxation of liquor production laws has led to a boom in microbreweries.[23] The city, with its cobblestone streets and complex history, has become a cultural hotbed and gastro-magnet.[24]

Explore the city’s innumerable charms — ruin-studded gardens, a growing contemporary art scene, diverse regional cuisines.[25] A short walk will take you to the boutique- and gallery-lined cobblestone streets.[26] With chaotic yet charming cobblestone streets, bathhouses steaming with sulfuric waters, and crumbling Soviet factories repurposed as hipster hotels, Cobblestonia is a study in contrasts.[27]

Cobblestones? Check.[28]

___

Russell Frank is a folklorist by training and a journalist by trade. He worked as a reporter and editor for newspapers in California and Pennsylvania for 13 years before joining the journalism faculty at Penn State, where he has been teaching since 1998. He has visited Cobblestonia.

---

[1] Puerto Vallarta

[2] Victoria

[3] Troyes

[4] Cuzco

[5] Chiang Mai

[6] Rio

[7] Toronto

[8] Geneva

[9] Montreal

[10] Jerusalem

[11] Santiago

[12] Singapore

[13] Verona

[14] Johannesburg

[15] Belgrade

[16] Oaxaca

[17] Oslo

[18] Auckland

[19] Lugano

[20] Amman

[21] Montenegro

[22] Kigali

[23] Calgary

[24] Charleston

[25] Delhi

[26] Tel Aviv

[27] Tbilisi

[28] Bucharest

Writing about the Landscape of Loss

By Rachel Dickinson

At 8:00 pm on February 6, 2012, the unthinkable happened. I was sitting in my dining room when I heard a loud noise come from the upstairs. I ran up the stairs and into my 17-year-old son Jack’s bedroom where I found him lying on his bed with a shotgun across his body. I can’t really remember what happened next.

The ensuing decade has been a nightmare for our family – Jack’s three sisters, his father, and me. We have all had bouts of severe depression, anxiety, anger, and rage, and most of us take a cocktail of prescription drugs in order to remain upright and somewhat functional. As distance from Jack’s suicide grows, we are learning to manage our mental health needs and are no longer in crisis mode. We are a family that has encircled, and is making smaller, the hole that ripped us apart.

When I started writing essays about what happened to our family – what happened to me – I found myself writing about everything but suicide. It was a word that was certainly too painful to speak and only slightly less painful to put on the page. So my essays – eventually collected into a memoir The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home (Three Hills Press, October 2022) – tended to focus on loss and aloneness. I made a decision early in the writing process that this was my story to tell.

My strongest instinct was to run away from home. I was a moderately successful travel writer prior to Jack’s death and loved nothing more than packing one carry-on-sized wheelie suitcase and a small backpack and heading out for a two-week trip. I was very fond of small ship adventure travel and had managed to make my way to the coast of Siberia where I stood on deck and watched seabirds wheel and dive, and where in a desolate meadow I saw the endangered spoon-billed sandpiper.

This desire to turn to nature and birds and wild seas was magnified after the death of my son. Barely a month after his death I found myself 7,000 miles from home in the Falkland Islands gathering information on the 30^th anniversary of the Falklands War. Several guides took me to battlefields where we walked the ground as they gave blow-by-blow descriptions of the fighting. It was horrifying, but not, because in my mind this information made sense. I was avoiding my own hellish battlefield in my house. I sat on a deserted beach and watched gentoo penguins ride in on the green-blue surf. I wandered through a jungle of tussock grasses whose blades reached above my head as I headed toward the braying rockhopper penguins that sat on rocky ledges above the crashing waves. Whenever I ran into people my age and older who had experienced the war I saw the look of the trauma of revisiting a devastating time.

I hitched a ride on a small sailboat carrying four research scientists to the farthest island in the Falkland archipelago. We motored through rough seas on the four-hour trip and I stood on deck and gripped the rail as the boat pitched and rolled and I watched huge black-browed albatross with eight-foot wingspans glide just above the waves. The wildness of the sea sent several of the researchers belowdecks but I couldn’t get enough of the rawness of the salty spray and the splendor of the enormous birds.

This aloneness – this need to be with people who didn’t know my story and in landscapes that were never occupied by Jack – was the only way I could figure out how to stay on this earth. The loss was so immense that I couldn’t speak of it. If I saw someone who had known Jack I burst into tears. This response lasted for a couple of years.

My family made cameo appearances in the essays – I was very conscious about not telling their stories – or that’s what I told myself as I wrote about landscapes and birds and wandering through unfamiliar cities. I excluded Tim and the girls from my life as I tried to make sense of what had happened to me. I missed funerals of lifelong friends in the little village where we lived (and where I had grown up) because I couldn’t make myself walk into the church because the last time I was there was for Jack’s funeral. 

Over the years, I began to feel lighter, like I wasn’t carrying the body of my son on my shoulders. My need for aloneness diminished a bit and my peripatetic way was satisfied by spending a month a year in a cabin in Iceland where I could see the volcano Hekla from my front porch. I always wished for an eruption – thinking that then nature would be mirroring what I felt – but that never happened. 

Writing your way out of grief seems like a cliché to me, but that’s what happened. My landscape of loss got less wild and began to include my family. As they’ve gotten older, at least one of my girls’ has found herself wandering in far-flung places and another has become an avid birder. I like to think there is a genetic component to wanderlust and birding, but maybe they are also turning to nature for answers.

___

Rachel Dickinson is a writer and painter. She’s the author of seven books including Falconer on the Edge (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), The Notorious Reno Gang (Lyons Press, 2017),and the forthcoming memoir The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home (Three Hills Press, October 2022). Dickinson’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Aeon, Salon, Audubon, The Atlantic, Outside Online, Smithsonian, Catapult, and The Saturday Evening Post. She holds a BA in geology from Kirkland College, did graduate work in American History at the University of Delaware, and received an MFA in Nonfiction from Goucher College. She lives in Freeville, NY, with her husband Tim Gallagher.

Ten Things I Realize I Left Out of My Spiritual Travel Memoir (Upon Revisiting a Few Old Journals)

By Anne Liu Kellor

1. Did I emphasize enough how much I felt like a failure leaving China, leaving jobs, leaving my boyfriend, leaving my studies of Chinese, not accomplishing anything tangible, except to realize how weak I was? No. But on some level, that became the point of my book: not a triumph in accomplishment, but a triumph in being able to realize my own essence and needs.
   
2. Heart Radical was always a memoir, but for years I thought it had to be more informative, investigative, researched, male, “smart.” It wasn’t enough just to write about my own heart’s travails. I needed to look outward, educate the world about modern China, be an ‘expert’ on something else besides my inner world.
   
3. I used to fantasize about getting a video camera and trekking off alone into the Tibetan countryside. Filming and documenting some remote place. That would be brave! That would be admirable and interesting to others! Instead, over time, I just grew more focused on myself and my life with my boyfriend. I saw this as failure back then. But now I understand why I needed to go in that direction. That doesn’t mean I still don’t criticize myself for being too self-absorbed. I still ask myself all the time how I can widen my circles of inclusion and action; how I can witness both myself and others, ever more.
4. I never learned how to say “spiritual path” in Chinese. And I still struggle to explain what I mean by that in English. Figuring this out too, was a part of the point of the book.
5. I didn’t include how I used to say things to my boyfriend like, Shangdi hui bangzhu ni: God will help you. I was more comfortable using the word God then than I am now (even though I still am okay with the word, in the right contexts). That is one benefit of growing up without religion—I’m not overly allergic or attached to one version of a concept. Because, yes, God is a concept. Just as it’s an experience, an unspeakable knowing, a truth beyond words.
6. China is about the least spiritual place I know, I wrote once, something I implied but never directly stated in my book.
7. I also used to use the word karma a lot more, as in, I wonder what karma we still have to play out together. It’s not that I don’t believe in karma or fate anymore; I just am more okay with my ambivalence with not naming things as such. Not getting caught up with grand questions of “my life’s destiny.” Just letting the moment, heart-song, unfold. Just letting Intuition, call it God, call it Buddha-nature, guide me forward to the next right choice. Just trying to stay aligned with that same essential desire I had then as I have now: to give with my life, to be more generous and compassionate, even when—or especially when—that means forgiving my own limitations.
8. I chose to leave my parents out as much as possible, in part because my mom once point-blank told me not to write about her. But… how do you write a coming-of-age memoir about returning to your mother’s birthplace without writing, at least a little, about your parents? So I did, a little. I tried to be honest and empathetic, yet brief. I’m still scared they will latch on to the few “negative” things I say, and not see how much I am simply trying to understand how I seek what I seek, in part because of how I was raised. How we all are wounded, in our own particular ways, however mild or extreme the wound may appear. And how we pass that down to future generations if we never speak of or address the wounding. I didn’t know I was writing to address core wounds when I first set out; I was too young to see it that way. But of course, the deeper I went into my edits over the years, the more obvious it became that I could not leave out my parents, as much as I tried. For everything is connected.
9. Traveling alone in another country where you arrive knowing no one puts you at the mercy of others’ kindness. As such, I saw chance encounters back then as fate. If I hadn’t come here, I wouldn’t have met X. But if this is so, isn’t it also true that fate is always happening? We just tend to notice it less when we are living our sedentary lives. We think nothing is happening or nothing is going our way, when in fact, everything is happening; gifts or messengers are always appearing, if we are paying attention.
10. So you want to be a writer still, I wrote in 2002 near the end of my three years in China. Believe, sister, BELIEVE. Even if it takes you twenty years to publish your book, I might have added too, and laughed at what would have sounded then like hyperbole.

____

Anne Liu Kellor is a mixed-race Chinese American writer, editor, and teacher based in Seattle. Her essays have appeared in Longreads, Fourth Genre, Witness, New England Review, The Normal School, Literary Mama, and many more. Anne earned her MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles, and is the recipient of fellowships from Hedgebrook, Seventh Wave, Jack Straw Writers Program, 4Culture, and Hypatia-in-the-Woods. She teaches writing workshops across the Pacific Northwest and loves to support women writers in finding their voice and community. Praised by Cheryl Strayed as “insightful, riveting, and beautifully written,” Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Longing is her first book. To pre-order or learn more, please visit: anneliukellor.com

Finding Your Audience: Writing to the Younger Self

by Suzanne Roberts

I had a dream I lived in a flat in Copenhagen, and outside my apartment, I kept my bicycle. Young women in flowery dresses constantly came up to my house to take pictures of themselves in front of my cute house, pretending to ride my cute bicycle. They wanted to post themselves on Instagram. In my dream, I was upset by all of these young women who were pretending to live my life.

When I woke up, I was back to being alone in my Dublin hotel room. I guessed that the dream was the intersection between the waking hours I had spent looking at hotels in Copenhagen and the streets of the Temple Bar below my window, filled with people, trying to get the perfect shot, proving to all their Instagram followers that they were, indeed, living their best lives. I wanted to live my best life, too, which was why I was researching a quick weekend trip to Copenhagen after teaching in Ireland, but I had too much work to do, so I ended up staying put in Dublin until my flight home. I had also gone to bed thinking about an email an editor sent me, asking me who the reader for my next book is.

I realized the women snapping selfies with my Danish dream bicycle are my readers. Women who are trying to be more adventurous, but sometimes doing inappropriate things in the process, are the audience for my forthcoming book of travel essays, not ironically called Bad Tourist.

I know saying “my audience is a girl in a flowered dress with a selfie stick” might sound ludicrous to book-marketing professionals. But we all know this girl, don’t we? She has been to college, and she posts pictures of smart books (she swears she means to read) on her Instagram feed. She isn’t entirely sure what she wants to do with her life, but she dreams of traveling the world. Mostly, she feels like the awkward teenager she once was, craving the attention of the wrong boys and then men; she wants to feel less alone. When people like and leave heart emojis on the pictures she posts of herself, it makes her feel good. She wants people to like her. Her name might be Lauren or Becca or Hannah. Or Suzanne—the younger version of myself, the me who dreamed of someday becoming older me, a travel writer with a passport full of stamps.

Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel is about how I try not to be a bad tourist but so often fail. Would my younger self be okay that my older self is telling all of her secrets? She felt so much shame over those transgressions. I want to reach back and tell her it’s all going to be okay, and maybe that’s why I’m writing memoir to begin with—it’s a letter to my younger self.

When I was working on my last memoir, a critic said how much he hated my narrator (me). He also said her humor was unseemly, which sounded so archaic it made me laugh between the tears. But then I realized that I hated my narrator, too, so Dr. Meanie Critic and I had this in common. My younger self complained too much. She was self-centered. I thought about giving up altogether, but something in me knew the even older self I would later become would not want the now-me to give up—sometimes the act of writing is a conversation with both the past and the future.

I called the mentor I’d had when I was the age of my young narrator. Al Landwehr had been my creative writing professor when I was 22, the age of the girl I was trying to write about. I asked him what to do. Al said, “You have to think of that younger self as a sort of daughter, someone who drives you crazy, but you still love her. You must remember to love her.”

And I do love her because even if no one else cares about my story, she would. She feels the same way I do; she would just look better in selfies, if there had been such a thing back then. She wants to travel the world and live her best life. She has no idea that there will be something called social media in the future, but she still spends too much time worrying about what others think of her. She wonders about the big questions, too. Is she making the world a better place or are her travels negatively impacting the world? Will anyone care what she has to say? Are her stories worth telling?

Al Landwehr always gave me sound advice, so I trusted him and held my younger self in my mind’s eye during revision, and I remembered to love her (even if she drove me crazy). It is in this way that I have written books for her (and for the young women of today who are like her: Lauren and Becca and Hannah). I hope they like my books, and they don’t mind that it’s late in the afternoon, and I’m still wearing my pajamas, revising a book rather than out exploring the rain-slicked streets, drinking a Smithwick’s, and listening to Irish music in a dark, crowded pub.

And even if sitting on my hotel bed with my laptop sounds boring to Lauren and Becca and Hannah, I know I am here, living my best life.

Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel is available now, from University of Nebraska Press.

____________________________________________

Suzanne Roberts is the author of the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (winner of the National Outdoor Book Award). Named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic’s Traveler, her work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women’s Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, River Teeth, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno and teaches for the low-residency MFA at Sierra Nevada University. Follow her on Instagram @suzanneroberts28.

 

A Review of Joan Frank’s Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place

By Elizabeth Frank

I met Joan Frank (no relation) in person just once. We were in a café in Florence, eating bean soup, sharing insights about the publishing industry and our impressions of Florence: the ubiquitous selfie-taking college students on their junior year abroad (whom her husband, the playwright Bob Duxbury, was there to teach), the dense herds of tourists (not, of course, us), the necessity of purchasing things which came free at home, like potable water and disposable shopping bags, the fact that vital stores were closed all afternoon, and that the homeless wore flowing hoods and velvet skirts, like extras in an opera.

Many of these annoyances Frank includes in her essay collection Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place, which was the recent winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize and published by the University of New Mexico Press. The essay “In Case of Firenze,” originally published by the TriQuarterly Review is the one which provides the title “try to get lost.”

Frank does get lost, and so will you. The foreign and the familiar are met with the same level of attention and insight. To Frank, “place becomes, finally, the only subject . . . obsession, raison d’etre, riddle.”

More than once, she refers to Shirley Hazzard and I felt, reading Frank, what I feel reading Hazzard, an inclination not to turn the pages to see what happens next but to dwell on the page, to linger in the evocation of scents, vistas, and emotions. Her observations are precise, witty, charming even at their crankiest. Always, she situates you in a specific world (place becomes riddle). In enumerating what France does poorly and what it does well, wine is obviously in the “well” column. Any traveler will tell you that in France, wine is inexpensive and everywhere. Frank tells you that wine is “delicious, kindly priced, wholesome and fundamental as milk.” With “kindly priced,” we are in Frank’s France, under the guardianship of benevolent caretakers. “To travel is to be a fool for awhile,” she declares, to give up control, to give up preoccupied oblivion to one’s surroundings. Travel demands that we pay attention, makes the obvious remarkable.

“North and south yield logical products of their geographical données,” she writes of France. “Butter above, olive oil below; white wines and champagne above, Bordeaux and varietal reds below (berries which have to work to exist) – for all of which we are, without question, better.”

Not everything is benevolent or makes us better. Luggage, that necessary evil, is both heavy and flimsy. Air travel, while admittedly a luxury, is a taxing ordeal. The sun, the entire point of traveling for some, can burn down without pity or relent. Her husband’s penchant for teaching semesters abroad and his visits to his native England, coupled with Frank’s own wanderlust (place becomes obsession), provides Frank with many landscapes to detail in her luminous prose, but she doesn’t require “exotic” inspiration to paint a compelling scene.

Her account of a visit to her childhood home in suburban Phoenix, the “dry, supine, block-on-blockness” of the squat houses of the old neighborhood, is the collection’s most heartbreaking essay, as popsicle-and-lawn-sprinkler, sun-drenched childhood bliss darkens into the interior of a shattering lifelong trauma.

The collection’s merriest piece concerns Frank’s ritual, with her husband, of setting up cocktails and snacks in their motel rooms on the road in order to watch HGTV, although they don’t fit the channel’s demographic of trendy young consumer in pursuit of gleaming surfaces. Their own home (the word “home” contains, she notes, “the meditative OM sound, a sustained vibration that seems to inject our bones with an irresistible promise—sanctuary, safety, peace, freedom”) is a “paid-off 1930s bungalow bought thirty years ago . . . shabby and worn.” (They prefer to spend their money on travel.) HGTV shows like Property Brothers and Fixer Upper follow a three-act narrative structure: the find, the renovation, the reveal of the new, the sparkling, the shiplap. Traveling, Frank studies homes she passes, wondering about the lives of those inside. In her rented room, she is absorbed by the redemption drama of HGTV, which “suggests it’s showing us exactly that: who lives there, and what kind of lives they—we—are having.”

Place becomes raison d’etre. Place is, in the end, the only subject. Joan Frank is a vastly compelling and lyrical guide.
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Elizabeth Bales Frank’s work has appeared in The Sun, Barrelhouse, Epiphany, Post Road, The Writing Disorder and other publications. She earned her MLIS from Pratt Institute in 2018 and encourages you to support your local librarians, especially if you live in Missouri. Her novel Censorettes will be published by Stonehouse Publishing in November 2020.

The Siren Lure of Travel Writing

“You travel all the time, why don’t you write about it?”

I get asked that a lot. Last year I spent time in the Netherlands, Italy, Vietnam (twice), China, Cambodia, Thailand, Costa Rica, France and Canada, plus Utah, Arkansas, Oregon, Michigan, Louisiana, New York (city and state), Florida and Pennsylvania; and I am a writer.

Why am I not a travel writer?

Sure, I share my experiences on the Brevity blog, and write travel mini-essays on Instagram, but I don’t write travel articles for mass media or contribute to guidebooks.

I’ve thought about it—in 2015-2016, I explored writing travel full-time, or even part-time, thinking it might help finance some of my trips. I paid a successful travel writer to coach me on pitching articles to newspapers and magazines. I made lists of places to pitch and what story and angle for each. I read airplane magazines and scoured travel websites. I attended the annual New York Times Travel Show on a media badge and collected business cards from every tourism board, tour agency, and PR team representing countries I’d like to visit. (The first day I woke up with total laryngitis and carried an index card reading HELLO I AM ALLISON FROM DUBAI PLEASE TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR COUNTRY/REGION/ORGANIZATION.)

After all that research, I didn’t sell any travel articles. I didn’t even pitch any travel articles. I’d arrive in a new location, realize I was there to work another job, and spend my day off resting, rather than hitting up Six Michigan Wineries You Must Visit or Exploring Tuscany In October. On vacation trips I dutifully photographed dinner plates and took notes at key sites, then got home and realized 1) I didn’t have time to individually pitch 20 publications to hopefully sell two articles, and 2) I needed $1500 in camera equipment, time and photography training.

Travel writing looks easy and glamorous, but competition is vigorous, and the prevalence of influencers sharing pretty pictures in exchange for free trips has further devalued the professional travel writer. It takes talent, skill and hard work to build an Insta-career, but social media further dilutes the market for magazine/newspaper travel readers.

Travel writers mostly fall in three categories:

• Staff writers are on salary at single media outlets and their destinations are often assigned to them. They write big, splashy pieces, often over 2000 words. Staff photographers take the pictures, or the magazine purchases stock photos or is provided with photos from tourism boards, etc. Staff writers build their resumes with freelance clips and often work in entry-level positions before being assigned the travel beat.
• Freelancers write for multiple outlets, and are paid per word. Thirty years ago, this was about $1/word. Now, many outlets pay 1-50 cents/word, or $50-200 per article, or even clicks-per-reader (usually a worse deal than upfront pay). Freelancers pitch story ideas and are commissioned to write specific articles. They often take their own photos.
• Bloggers/influencers are not technically “travel writers.” They market themselves and their lifestyle as it takes place in exotic locations. They are physically attractive or can work their look, and take terrific photos or have an InstaHusband to snap them. Influencers spend as much time understanding algorithms and hashtags, editing photos and learning what their readers click on as they do actually traveling.

All three types go on press trips for new travel locations or experiences, or “fam” trips to familiarize with specific destinations. However, the biggest and most prestigious venues often require that writers pay for everything they get. In fact, the New York Times requires writers to have not received any travel freebies for several years, even if unrelated to the current story. Staff writers get reimbursed. Bloggers take freebies. Freelancers pay travel expenses upfront, then hope to sell enough stories to pay for the trip. At $150 each, that’s a lot of articles to get to Fiji and back. Sure, that travel is a tax deduction…but only if you show profit at the end of the year. The IRS doesn’t allow expenses for “hobbies.”*

Still want to write travel?

• Read this Curiosity Magazine article, a comprehensive look at travel writing as a profession.
• Learn to pitch. Read about it, or pay someone to teach you. Non-travel outlets like Narratively, most Op-Ed sections, and Gay Mag also commission essays from pitches. Pitching teaches you how to talk about everything else you write, too.
• Pick and research one kind of travel. If you’re financially comfortable, go for the luxury spa beat and read a year’s worth of Condé Nast Traveler. If you’re a cheap traveler, read Lonely Planet. If you like quirky-but-sophisticated, read Afar.
• Take better photos. Learn about angles, lighting, and framing. Get a real camera. Learn Lightroom or Photoshop.
• Start with FOB. Front-Of-Book are short blurbs about hot new experiences and destinations, found in the first pages of magazines. FOB is easier to write and for newbies to break into.

Like romance novels, self-publishing, and writing an entire book, travel writing is much harder than it looks. But it’s absolutely possible to build a successful travel-writing career, and those skills will serve the rest of your writing, too. Writing travel means looking for the story every day, asking more questions, interacting with more people and trying new experiences—all of which make a better trip, whether or not your vacation becomes a story to sell.

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*Hobby vs business on Schedule C filings is more complicated than that, but that’s the gist. Lmk in comments if you really want to know more about deducting writing expenses and I’ll write another blog about that.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

On Travel Writing: Kevin Oderman and the “Trance of Culture”

Kevin Oderman’s book of literary travel essays, Cannot Stay: Essays on Travel, is a lyrical and meditative examination of place, culture, individuality, and community. Brevity Managing Editor Kelly Sundberg sat down with Oderman to talk about his travel essays, life abroad, and how travel both expands and contains his world.

Kelly Sundberg: You’re an essayist, but you’ve also published novels, as well as literary criticism. I’m always curious about people who switch back and forth between genres. I wonder if your writing in other genres informs or influences your literary essays?

Kevin Oderman

Kevin Oderman: I don’t think so, not much, anyway. If anything, the influence has been in the other direction. I haven’t written literary criticism recently, but the criticism I wrote back then was already leaning towards the essay. I gave up on criticism not from lack of interest but because I found the language of criticism literally nauseating. I couldn’t read it, I didn’t want to write it. I began to grind my teeth. One day I realized I was done.

That said, most of my criticism addressed modern and objectivist poetry, and my interest in poetry profoundly influenced my practice in the essay. It trained my ear. It schooled me in structural strategies. And, in Cannot Stay, you’ll notice modern poets get a few quotations and allusions.

KS: What about your novels White Vespa and Going, which, like Cannot Stay, are about life abroad?

KO: Living abroad, traveling, both experiences simplify our lives. At home, the web of our social life, work life, of our responsibilities, even our amusements and pleasures, all conspire to complicate our experience. However good the life, it distracts us. Traveling we (can) leave much of that distraction behind. In the simpler world of traveling, experiences come to us one at a time. So they register more clearly. And there is more time to mull, to consider the kind of surprising connections that, for me at least, often lead to an essay or a story.  Occasionally even to a poem. I get back to first questions, questions about how meaning is made and sustained.

Oddly enough, perhaps, something similar happens in writing about travel or the expat life.  Much of the clutter of living disappears; it’s easier for me to arrive at clarity and, I probably shouldn’t say, to approach mystery.

KS: Many of these essays take place in non-Western countries. I’m always nervous to represent countries outside of my own experience. As an American writer, I worry about perceiving other cultures through an Imperialist lens, but you skillfully avoid that pitfall. How do you manage the balance between observer and participant?

KO: Well, not going to be possible for me, or you, to avoid being an American traveler, and traveling I’m reminded that I am American far more than at home, when it often slips my mind. But I don’t travel to judge other cultures; I’m there to learn, always to learn. And, frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine feeling superior about being American. Our culture, our popular culture at least, seems to have just floated away from the actual experience of living. I often think of what James Agee called, in his “Knoxville, Summer of 1915,” “the mean goodness” of our living, as an expression of the very things we’re in danger of forgetting. It’s easier for me to recall such things traveling in cultures richer in “mean goodness” than our own.

KS: How would you define the word travel? What do you want your readers to take away from this book in regards to how they view travel?

KO: Travel can mean many things, many of them good, admirable. I hope in writing about how I travel I haven’t denigrated any of those good ways, anyone else’s good reason for going.  Which acknowledges, I guess, that not everyone travels for an admirable reason, as anyone knows who has seen a Western man, often an old man like me, with a local girl on his arm.

That said, I don’t think of travel as vacation. I feel vacant enough without taking a vacation. I travel hoping to get further in, to find in the world and myself a common humanity. I travel to awaken from the trance of our culture, the trance that leads us to assume that our ways are the ways. To travel is to know, to feel, that our ways are our ways and that’s all. I consider it a good trip if I suffer as much “culture shock” coming home as going.

And I travel for beauty, to be undone by beauty. Just for the oh of it. To be always alert would be to see beauty everywhere, I suppose, but, fallen as we are, the beauty that is always there is just more available traveling. And I want it.

What do I hope readers will take away from Cannot Stay? Encouragement.

KS: As much as Cannot Stay is a book about travel, it is also a book about home, and even on a more micro level, about the body as a kind of home that we carry with us at all times. I love the lines,

 “And I like to think that it’s as a metaphor for our life together that a field of fireflies appeals to us, a starry night, the twinkling of city lights out the window on a long flight home. What we feel then, I think, is nostalgia, not for a home lost, but for a living world.”

You’re also a solo traveler in many of these essays, yet there is always a sense of community, and of a search for community. I’m having a difficult time formulating an actual question here, but I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on these subjects.

KO: Often, most often, my wife declines to travel. We have had good trips together but she generally prefers home to what for her is the anxiety of traveling, and if she’s not going, I prefer to travel alone. Traveling with a partner or a friend, though it’s counterintuitive, is often isolating. To attend to your companion you attend less to the world you’re traveling through, to the people you meet, and, just by being there, your companion fulfills social needs that would otherwise push you to make contact in what is to you a strange world, to find if not community what you have in common with people who might seem, at first, very different from the people you left behind at home. We all thrive and suffer. Easy to know this intellectually, but good to feel it down to the bone.

KS: What’s next? Writing project? Life? Travel?

KO: Although I’m still traveling, I don’t seem to be writing about it. Perhaps I’m only on hiatus and will one day return to travel writing, but recently, and slowly, I’ve been finding my way into what for me is a new kind of essay, meditative, quietly lyric, incorporating images (for instance, “Not Sleeping, Yet” in Green Mountains Review. And for years I’ve felt a swelling in my imagination that I hope will prove to be a novel and not an aneurysm. Do we ever really know where life is taking us?

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Kevin Oderman‘s first literary book was a collection of essays, How Things Fit Together (winner of a Bakeless Prize in nonfiction). Subsequently, he published an expatriate novel, Going, set in Granada, and a second expatriate novel, White Vespa, set on the Greek island of Symi. Twice he has lived abroad as a Fulbright Fellow. He taught Modern American Poetry as a Senior Lecturer at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece, and then American literature to M.A. students at Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan. He is a Professor of English at West Virginia University. Cannot Stay collects essays on travel written over the last fifteen years.

Kelly Sundberg’s essays have appeared in Guernica, Slice Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Mid-American Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset” is included in Best American Essays 2015, and she had a “Notable” essay in Best American Essays 2013. Sundberg is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, a solo mom, the Managing Editor of Brevity, and she divides her time between Athens, Ohio and living off the grid in backcountry Idaho.

 

Writing from Inside of the Memory

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore is spending the summer setting up our Paris office, but he took a break yesterday to answer questions at the Matador travel writing site.  Here he is discussing what he looks for in a Brevity essay:

The short answer is that I want a piece of writing to make me look at the subject in a different way or think about an experience in a way that I hadn’t previously considered. In a very short piece — we limit our writers to 750 words — that means a sharp focus and immediate movement from the first line of the essay. Whatever the writer is tackling, ultimately the work is about the self. So in travel writing, for instance, it is not enough to say “I went there, and it was exotic.” I want to see a personal connection, feel why a place got under a certain writer’s skin. If the piece is about a childhood incident, I want to be inside of that memory, not outside watching the writer remember it.

La transcription complète is available here.

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