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“Foreignness is an intoxicant. As when we’re drunk, we don’t know how much it’s our true selves coming out and how much it’s the drink speaking through us.”
–Pico Iyer, in Michael Shapiro’s A Sense of Place (2004)
This month at the RolfPotts.com Writers page, I interview C.M. Mayo, who is the author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, and Sky Over El Nido, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Mayo’s travel writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and numerous literary journals, among them, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and the North American Review.
In the interview, Mayo asserts that the biggest reward of travel writing is its eclectic nature. “The world is yours,” she says. “You can delve into flora, fashion, history, art, conflict, shamanism, political shenanigans, geography, the life cycle of a turtle, a gazillion different things, and, in my experience, almost anyone will talk to you. In researching Miraculous Air, I interviewed goat ranchers, painters, an installation artist, a priest, a street vendor, a social worker, a world-class architect, the owner of a sport-fishing fleet, a housewife, tomato pickers, a construction worker, and a surf star, just to mention a few. With paper and pen, and a sincere willingness to listen, and to really look, it’s as if all the curtains magically rise up.”
As for advice to budding travel writers, Mayo says, if you want to do it, do it. “Why wait?” she says. “If you don’t have the funds to take off for, say, Chang Mai, why not write about a neighborhood in your own town or city? Or a creek? Or the people who fish in that creek? Or are trying to save that creek? Subjects are nearby, and infinite. Take the craft seriously — and study poetry because it’s all poetry.”
Full interview online here.
“It’s easy to forget that travel is a privilege enjoyed by the citizens of the world’s richest nations. Per capita, the Swiss make the most international trips, followed by the Dutch, the English, the Canadians, and the Germans (Americans place tenth). Large swaths of humanity — Israelis and Palestinians; Thai women and Caribbean men; North Koreans and Arabs — have enormous difficulty obtaining visas and crossing borders. Small wonder that the travelogue is a genre dominated by white Europeans and North Americans. For an Iranian woman, travel writing just isn’t a viable career path.”
–Taras Grescoe, The End of Elsewhere (2003)
[Above: From a barge on the Seine, Paris American Academy students watch the opening of the Bastille Day fireworks at the Eiffel Tower. Rumor had it that this torch-like effect was meant to be a celebration of the Paris 2012 Olympics, but was instead used on Bastille Day when London landed the Olympic bid.]
We’ve just reached the midway point of my creative writing workshop at the Paris American Academy, and it’s been a great couple of weeks. Seventeen students from four countries are currently hard at work on their various travel stories, short stories, novel chapters, children’s stories, screenplays, poems and memoirs. We’ve also managed to have a lot of fun around the city, as evidenced by the photos below. Just click on the links below to see pop-up photos of friends, students and colleagues in class and at play in Paris.
For writers of narrative fiction and nonfiction, a vital element in retaining the interest of the reader is story structure. Indeed, regardless of how well you construct your sentences, or how deep your philosophical musings, the reader will be more likely to keep reading if you structure your story and characters in an enticing manner.
Hence, in a recent class session of the Paris American Academy writing workshop, I had students create collective tales by following a simple story-structure recipe. First, a student wrote a sentence creating a character. A second student then introduced a second character and created a conflict. A third student created a complication to the conflict, preferably involving dialogue. A fourth student created another complication, and a fifth student gave the story a climax. In this way, we were able to create a number of entertaining stories over the course of this 45-minute free-writing exercise.
The following story, which I’ll call “The Tragedy of Fernando and Rosita”, was written by Jeremy Rizik, Alexandra Bockfeldt, Joyce Hardy McDonald, Annette Terkaly, and Deborah Patton, in that order. And, despite the fact that it was authored spontaneously by five people of various backgrounds — differing in age from 17 to 79 — it holds together as a charming and engrossing (if not wildly original) example of how good use of structure can keep you reading until the very last line. [Note that changes of authorship are denoted by an asterisk (*).]
“Good travel writing is done by good writers who travel. It is not enough to have swum through piranha-infested waters to the source of the Amazon. You must be able to write well to convey that experience. When you have learned the craft of writing, you can make a stroll through your own suburban neighborhood seem interesting, even exciting. Good travel writing needs much the same ingredients as any good story — narrative, drive, characters, dialogue, atmosphere, revelation. Make it personal. Let the reader know how the place and the experience are affecting you.
“Good travel writing is just good writing. It must have literary merit. The most important journey you will make as a travel writer is the journey of a good sentence. Without that, you close encounter with the piranhas is wasted.
“Bad travel writing is done by travelers, often good travelers, who mistakenly believe they can write. There seems to be an awful lot of them about. Their prose is littered with clich
The following recently appeared in the “Readings” section of Harper’s:
Adapted from an essay by Mike Davis, in the March/April 2004 issue of New Left Review. Daws is currently writing a book about slums that will be published by Verso this year.
“In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with populations over one million; today there are 386, and by 2015 there will be at least 550. The present urban population (3 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960. The global countryside, meanwhile, will reach its maximum population (3.3 billion) in 2020 and thereafter will begin to decline. As a result, cities will account for all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 9 billion in 2050.
“Ninety-five percent of this final buildout of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries, whose populations will double to nearly 4 billion over the next generation. The most celebrated result will be the burgeoning of new megacities with populations in excess of 8 million and, even more spectacularly, hypercities with more than 20 million inhabitants. By 2025, Asia alone could have ten or eleven conurbations that large, including Jakarta, Dhaka, and Karachi. Shanghai could have as many as 27 million residents in its huge estuarial metro-region. Bombay meanwhile is projected to attain a population of 33 million, though no one knows whether such gigantic concentrations of poverty are biologically or ecologically sustainable.
“But if megacities are the brightest stars in the urban firmament, three quarters of the burden of population growth will be borne by faintly visible second-tier cities: places where, as U.N. researchers emphasize, “there is little or no planning to accommodate these people or provide them with services.” In China the number of official cities has soared from 193 to 640 since 1978. In Africa, likewise, the supernova-like growth of a few giant cities such as Lagos (from 300,000 in 1950 to 10 million today) has been matched by the transformation of several dozen small towns and oases such as Ouagadougou, Nouakchott, Douala, and Antananarivo into cities larger than San Francisco or Manchester.
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