Tom Bissell and Ayun Halliday at RolfPotts.com

Since I’ve been on the road of late, I’ve been slow in calling attention to two new travel writer interviews at RolfPotts.com. This month I feature Harper’s correspondent Tom Bissell, whose travel memoir Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia was released by Pantheon late last year.

Bissell’s advice to would-be travel writers is integrate storytelling techniques of fiction into your nonfiction travel narrative. “Read a lot of history and fiction,” he says. “Too few travel books, in my view, chose to get down and dirty with history, and too few read with the fluidness of, say, good fiction. You need that quasi-fictional propulsive storytelling in travel writing, both for texture and for pacing. This is not to say that one should write fiction, only that much can be learned and gained, I believe, from interbreeding genres. I tried to call Chasing the Sea a "travel novel," for instance, but my publisher convinced me that that was nutty. They were right, but I still think there is a fourth genre out there somewhere to be explored. Second, I would say that travel writers should find the places and stories they have a real emotional connection with; otherwise, the journey will flag, and readers won't care. You have to find the stories that only you can tell, or that no one else has thought to tell.”

Back in February, I interviewed No Touch Monkey! author Ayun Halliday, who condones a DYI approach to getting started in travel writing. “Seeing your stomping grounds with the excited eyes of a traveler is a wonderful policy, with benefits that extend beyond your writerly ambitions,” she says. “Rather than trying to interest publishers in the traveling observations of an 'unknown', become the king or queen of your own publishing empire. Put out a ‘zine about your travels, or blog your brains out! Eventually someone in the industry will take note and then you'll earn your bonafide Girl Scout travel writing badge, but in the meantime, why wait?”