Anyone with an interest in travel writing and journalism should check out the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, which features a great article by Robert D. Kaplan on the advantages of travel writing over orthodox international journalism. The article is not available online [update: it is now; see link below], but I will be quoting from it regularly in coming weeks. Here’s a sample outtake to get things started:

“Just listening to people, to their stories — rather than cutting them off to ask probing, impolite questions — forms the essence of…good travel books. I learned this over two decades ago while trying to interview a refugee in Greece who had just escaped from Stalinist Albania. I had a list of questions to ask this refugee, but instead he preferred to tell me the story of his life. It was only after listening to him for several hours that the information I sought began to slip out.

“But such a leisurely approach goes against the grain of journalism as it is commonly practiced. Reporting emphasizes the intrusive, tape-recorded interview; travel writing emphasizes the art of good conversation, and the experience of how it comes about in the first place. It has long been a cliché among correspondents that in Africa 10 percent of journalism is doing interviews, and 90 percent is the hassles and adventures of arranging them. But while the former fits within the narrow strictures of daily news articles, it is the latter that tells you so much more about the continent.

“The travel writer knows that people are least themselves when being tape-recorded. You’ll never truly understand anybody by asking a direct question, especially someone you don’t know very well. Rather than interrogate strangers, which is essentially what reporters do, the travel writer gets to know people, and reveals them as they reveal themselves. After being with a battalion of marines for several weeks in Iraq, I noticed that they suddenly stopped using profane language when some journalists arrived and turned on their tape recorders. Whatever the marines were in front of the journalists, they were less real than they had been before.”

–Robert D. Kaplan, “Cultivating Loneliness“, Columbia Journalism Review, Jan-Feb 2006

Literary Feud: Patrick Symmes and Tim Cahill duke it out in Key West (see below)

It’s been a few weeks now since I attended the Key West Literary Seminar — which featured a “travel and adventure” theme, and boasted a great slate of A-list travel writers, from Peter Matthiessen, to Gretel Ehrlich to Pico Iyer, to Tim Cahill, to Robert Stone. It was my first-ever sojourn to a conference of this sort, and I found it a great experience that I’d recommend to anyone.

I met a wide range of interesting people in Key West — average folks and travel scribes alike — but I’ll comment here on the writers I met, since I rarely have the opportunity to meet the luminaries of my genre.

So, in no particular order, here are some impressions:

• Pico Iyer was, without a doubt, the rock-star of the gathering, due largely to his effortlessly articulate opening speech, “A New Kind of Travel for a New Kind of World” (which I have been — and will be — excerpting on this blog). Those who were unfamiliar with his work before the conference went scrambling to his bio page as the speech went on, and he was in high demand for the rest of the week.
• Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins was the other rock-star of the gathering. Way back in 1998, when I first set up my RolfPotts.com website as a way to pitch Salon.com on a travel column, I used Collins’s end-of-the-millennium poem “Dancing Toward Bethlehem” as my front-page epigram. I mentioned this when I introduced myself to him at the seminar, and we later chatted about what types of experiences qualify for poems and travel stories alike (we both agreed that literary conference experiences don’t typically fit the bill). As we spoke, I was surprised to learn that he’d never heard of Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 anti-war road-trip poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (I thought every poet would know it, but then I grew up in Wichita so perhaps I’m biased). Collins said he’d never been all that impressed with Ginsberg’s anti-war poetry, but that he’d check out “Wichita Vortex Sutra” when he got home.
• One of my favorite personalities from the seminar was Tim Cahill, who is possibly the most disheveled non-homeless individual I’ve ever met. He’s even quirkier and funnier in person than in his writing, and his wife Linnea was good fun too. I joined the Cahills and adventure scribe Lawrence Millman (who might qualify as the second-most disheveled individual I’ve met) one night for oysters and whiskey, and they all merrily drank me under the table while we argued about evolutionary psychology, the idea of the “global soul”, and the proper use of past tense.
• Patrick Symmes and Michael Shapiro also made for good drinking company during the seminar. At one point, I suggested to Symmes and Cahill that — in the interest of raising the profile of the travel-writing milieu — they start a big, bombastic, public literary feud with one another. They both thought this was a splendid idea, but as the night wore on it became clear that both writers were too affable to actually make this happen (though, as evidenced above, they were able to pose for some moderately convincing fistfight photos).
• Adventure writer Kira Salak had a detached intensity that made her somewhat difficult to talk to (Thomas Swick alluded to being blown-off by her in his World Hum blog of the seminar). And, while her adventures in various parts of the world (hiking solo across Papua New Guinea, paddling solo down the Niger River, etc.) are impressive for someone of any gender, listening to her talk at the seminar made me nervous for her future safety. Indeed, she continually left the impression that she seeks extremely dangerous experiences for arbitrary reasons — her next stated adventure is traveling across Iraq and Iran by donkey — and even Peter Matthiessen publicly implored her to be careful in her travels.
• Speaking of Thomas Swick, I enjoyed meeting him after following his newspaper travel column for several years — and I liked that he wasn’t shy about disagreeing with people. For example, Swick countered Iyer and Cahill’s assertion that the best travel stories happen by accident, pointing out that his best stories have come from good trips with proper planning and pre-arranged contacts. Bruce Chatwin famously felt the same way (though I personally tend to side with Iyer and Cahill). My favorite quote from Swick’s blog of the experience was this: “What is impressive is how many good travel writers there are in this country when the travel magazines continue to obsess about resorts and spas.” Indeed.
• Perhaps the most impressive traveler-writer I met in Key West was septuagenarian Irishwoman Dervla Murphy, with whom I had the pleasure of sharing a Guinness after the last panel. Though she’s in her seventies, Murphy travels solo to far-flung places like Ethiopia and Laos, traveling close to the ground (often on foot or by bicycle) and writing engaging books about the experience. She’s also very gracious in person, and truly interested in what one has to say. The only thing that struck me as odd about her came when we were talking about global aid agencies, and I made reference to something I’d read in The Economist. “The Economist is terrible,” she said. “I’d never read a magazine like that.” Given Murphy’s socialist leanings (Murphy wore at Che Guevara t-shirt for one panel), I can see why she’d disagree with the pro-market content of The Economist, but I was a little startled by her assertion. After all, any good socialist would do well to familiarize herself with the most intelligent arguments for capitalism (if only to refute them) — and any mindful traveler would do well to learn how global economies work (if only to recognize their negative — or positive — impacts abroad).
• This in mind, I’d reckon that one weakness of the seminar was a total lack of political diversity among the panelists. At times, the panel discussions came off sounding like another episode of “Liberals Being Self-Congratulatory” (the longest-running show in American letters), and the presence of an intelligent, well-traveled rabble-rouser like P.J. O’Rourke might have spiced things up considerably. As Swick and South Florida Sun-Sentinel book critic Chauncey Mabe have already implied in their writings on the seminar, Barry Lopez in particular aired his politics with such humorlessness and pompous self-regard that he put himself in the rare position of a preacher who sends his own choir streaming toward the exits. Granted, the environmental causes he espouses are important, but (since the political success of environmental issues depends on appealing to empathetic conservatives) I can’t help but think that the cause would be better served if Lopez kept his ego in check and stuck to writing and research.
• Speaking of critic Chauncey Mabe, I had the pleasure of hanging out with him on several occasions at Key West, but I disagree with his assertion (made later, in his newspaper column) that “travel writing is among the trivial genres.” Mabe is certainly not the first critic to make this sort of declaration (indeed, were there a trade school for literary critics, “Bashing Travel Writing” would be a 101-level course), but this notion seems more tiresome each time I hear it. In fact, to paraphrase something Ryszard Kapuscinski said nearly 20 years ago, I find it befuddling that the modern mainstream literary world is obsessed with stories of domestic turmoil, suburban hanky-panky and solipsist-confessional horseshit in a time when massive human movement across cultures (in both the figurative and physical sense) is the story of our age. To ponder whether or not it’s moral to travel “in an age of global warming, social unrest and terror” strikes me as beside the point — an empty exercise in rhetorical hand wringing. Regardless of what café moralists think, writers who are willing to travel slowly and report honestly about other cultures are vital in a country where most world regions don’t merit media coverage unless they’ve recently been host to a natural disaster, a large explosion, or a Hollywood film-shoot.

My thanks to Key West Literary Seminar executive director Miles Frieden for making my attendance possible! For more information on the KWLS (next year’s theme is “Mystery, Intrigue, and Psychological Drama”), click here.

Key West blog photos courtesy of Michael Shapiro (who you can click here to see having a Guinness with Dervla Murphy; that’s Dervla and me below…).

Guinness time:Dervla Murphy and Rolf share a beer in Key West.

“In some ways, the very movement of the world around us enforces the need for stillness. Movement is almost the first act of a symphony that stillness must complete. I am interested in all the new contours and textures and possibilities of the world, but really they only make sense when we can take those little pieces of impermanence and little fragments of what is almost coming to seem like an MTV world — and turn them into something more permanent and more resonant. For me, the recollection in tranquility is much more important than the fleeting emotion. Adventure is not so much about going into the world and recording all its features as about coming back into oneself, into the stillness of one’s desk, taking the little shards of the world collected on one’s journeys and trying to make a sense of them, a shape of them, trying even to put them into a stained-glass whole.”
–Pico Iyer, from “A New Kind of Travel for a New Kind of World”, a speech given at the Key West Literary Seminar, January 5, 2006

For the second time in under a month, I have an experimental-voice travel story appearing in an online travel magazine. A few weeks ago, it was “The Art of Writing a Story About Walking Across Andorra“, which appeared in World Hum (and was linked by venues such as Arts & Letters Daily, MetaFilter, and About.com).

Now, I’m happy to announce the debut of “Tantric Sex For Dilettantes“, which appears in this month’s issue of Perceptive Travel.

The story is a second-person recounting of my trip to a Tantra class in Rishikesh, India some years ago (which Jen Leo earlier alluded to in her story from Sand in My Bra). In it, I examine the sometimes superficial pursuits that come with travel. “You did not initially come here to learn Tantric sex,” I write early in the story. “Rather, you stopped here en route to the Himalayas, on the recommendation of a yoga-obsessed friend. You are not much into yoga, but one charm of travel is that it frees you to be a dilettante. Just as you tried scuba diving in Thailand and windsurfing in Galilee, you intend to try yoga in Rishikesh and decide later if you really want to make it an active part of your life.”

To find out how I fare in the Tantric ashram, read the full story here.

As for Perceptive Travel, it’s a new online travel magazine started this year by Worlds Cheapest Destinations author Tim Leffel. Other stories in the current issue include Bruce Northam’s Think Outside the Fence, Peter Moore’s Secret Men’s Monkey Business, Harold Stephens’s Cruising with Admiral Zheng He, and Jen Leo’s Lure of the Cards.

“A recurrent event in history that has always fascinated me is first contact. The most vivid examples come from travel — the age of exploration and discovery. Usually, first contact is construed as Columbus meeting his first Arawak and calling him and Indian; but consider the reverse: the Arawak meeting a fat little Italian clutching a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels on the deck of a caravel [. . .]. First contact, was a vivid and recurrent event for everyone — bumping into a stranger on the subway, finding yourself with a fellow rider in an elevator, knocking elbows with your seatmate on a plane — at a bus stop, at a checkout counter, on a beach, in a church or a movie theater, wherever we were thrown together and had to deal with it.”
–Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (2003)

An interesting question I got recently from the Vagabonding.net Q&A came from a New Jersey teacher named Doug, who wrote:

I am just coming off two of the greatest months of my life spent traveling in Thailand, Cambodia, and Malaysia. I am not 3-days returned and finding it exceedingly difficult to readjust to my old life here. In about a week and a half, I’ll begin my second year of teaching high school here in NJ. I’ve found that the teacher/student relationship here in the US is much more strained and difficult than it needs to be. I wish I could treat them more as equals and make the environment more fun, however, I find there are so many rules to abide that this is near impossible. Do you have any suggestions on incorporating the relaxed, common-sense rules of the road that I’ve learned into my classroom to make it a different, yet effective, learning environment from what my students ordinarily see?

This is what I told Doug:

I know the feeling you’re going through right now. I call it “re-entry” — that time when you have to readjust to your old (yet strangely new) situation, which used to feel “normal”, but doesn’t anymore.

As for teaching, that will be a challenge of sorts, since the class environment is more structured and hierarchical than life on the road. My father, who taught high school for 20 years, says that the classroom is, by necessity, a two-dimensional learning environment. That is, your students are learning through texts, lectures, videos, etc — and not through real life experience. Because it’s 2D and not 3D like the world in general, it’s harder to pull things off as “equals”. Hence, initially in the year you can’t be too relaxed. Aim for good relations with your kids, but let them know you’re in charge. Once you have the respect and trust of your students — usually after a month or so — the class environment can relax a little and become more fun and reflective of the spontaneity of the road.

It helps, of course, if you have a lot of enthusiasm for what you’re teaching. The kids will catch on and be a part of that enthusiasm. They’ll also respond if you respect them, despite all of their annoying tendencies and imperfections. So set limitations and establish discipline, but respect who they are.

On a final teaching note, my father says it takes 3-5 years to really hit your groove and feel comfortable in regard to your students and your classes. So, like travel, it’s a process that gets easier if you allow yourself to be creative and disciplined, and learn from your mistakes.

“Travel writing is essentially a dialogue between a person and a place, and the dialogue is only as rich as what the person brings to it — the extent to which that person brings the weight and intensity of his questions or his hauntedness or his uncertainties. All of us when we’re traveling have remarkable encounters and feelings and experiences, but the reason that we cherish certain writers is that they are bringing something to these places that none of us could ever have expected.”
–Pico Iyer, from “A New Kind of Travel for a New Kind of World”, a speech given at the Key West Literary Seminar, January 5, 2006

Note: This is an outtake from Pico Iyer’s dazzling opening night speech at this year’s Key West Literary Seminar. I will be posting several more items from this literary seminar in coming days — and several more outtakes from Iyer’s speech in coming weeks.

I just got back from a magazine assignment on the Caribbean island of Grenada — and I’ve spent the past couple days catching up on various tasks, including my notes and comments on the Key West Literary Seminar, which I attended earlier this month.

I’ll be sharing a number of items from Key West in coming days, and I’ll start with a satire of editorial rejection slips that Michael Shapiro shared during his stint as a discussion moderator. Michael didn’t write this satire (he was unsure of the original author), but he got a lot of laughs reading it, as most everyone in the audience (and onstage) could relate. Here it is:

Dear editor,

Thank you very much for your recent rejection slip. As it does not quite fit my present requirements, I am returning it. This in no way reflects upon its merits.

Don’t be discouraged – I read your rejection slip with great interest, and I hope you’ll continue reading my work. I appreciate your thinking of me and wish you the best of luck in placing your rejection slip elsewhere.

Literally,

Just another writer

PS: Please forgive me for this printed note. I’d like to comment on each rejection slip, but the large number I receive makes it impossible to answer each one personally.

Note: Michael Shapiro will be following up his Key West stint with a Feb. 4 seminar at Corte Madera’s Book Passage, entitled “Making a Living as a Freelance Writer”. Shapiro will discuss strategies and techniques for earning a living from one’s writing. Topics include finding your niche, developing professional relationships with editors, targeting potential markets (publications), the art of the interview, and self-syndication. The class is from 10am to 4pm, and costs $95. For more information or to sign up, contact Book Passage at 800 999-7909.

“Ordinary travelers through life try to control everything, in order to protect their delusions from the nasty shocks of reality. What they get is uptight and paranoid; the music is stilled. By preplanning every aspect of their trip, whether vacation trip or life trip, they think they can circumvent the unimaginable flow of natural process (also known as Fate or the will of God). What they manipulate are puny imitations of reality, scraped bare of energy. Vagabonds know better, and book the details of their trip with an agent called Chance. Giving up control of your life frees you from the illusion that you can control it, and this freedom in turn connects you into its awesome energy and unlimited potential.”
–Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in the USA (1980)

In the course of her recent World Hum interview, travel editor Catherine Watson outlined a few items of her travel philosophy. I found this advice so apt for vagabonding in general that I’ll reproduce it here:

• Go everywhere you can.
• Be passionately curious.
• Talk to everyone who’ll let you, especially the quiet people.
• Stay till the bitter end. If the ceremonial lasts all day, so do you—you never know what’ll happen at the end.
• Be able to turn on a dime. Throw out your itinerary if something better comes along, and it always will.
• Don’t sweat the small stuff—or the bad beds, or the bed bugs, or the wet shoes or whatever. The discomforts will pass, the shoes will dry, and the memories will last.
• And maybe more than anything: Commit to the trip. Commit to the moment. Really be there.

Catherine Watson’s new book is entitled Roads Less Traveled: Dispatches from the Ends of The Earth. Full World Hum interview online here.