Note: I posted this last week, but at the time the RolfPotts.com server was down, and Karl’s full profile was not accessible. So, now that my server is up and running, let’s try this again…

My interviewee this month at the RolfPotts.com Travel Writers page is journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld, whose book China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic, is out this month from HarperCollins in the US and Penguin in the UK. A longtime staff writer and editor for The Nation, TIME and Sports Illustrated, Greenfeld’s travel writing has appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, Details, Arena and TIME among other publications.

Greenfeld gives a vivid and sometimes hilarious interview, as evidenced by this outtake about his ruse to recycle generic Asia travel stories for in-flight magazines in the early 1990s:

The most interesting period in terms of the peculiarities of making a living from writing was two year period in the early ’90s when I was writing for all the inflight magazines in Asia. This was when Asia was going through its boom and all those magazines: ANA’s Wingspan, Korean Airlines Morning Calm (The Clam, we called it), Cathay Pacific’s Discovery, JAL’s Winds, and a few others were paying decent money — Discovery and Morning Calm were paying like $1500 for stories, Wingpsan would pay like 300,000 yen (about $3000 at the time) and Winds paid the best of all, up to 400,000 for a story, although then Winds changed its rates and paid much less. And you could take the same stories and sell them to several magazines. I had another friend in Tokyo, Christopher Seymour — he went on to write this book Yakuza Diary — and we used to have this sort of assembly line system of writing for inflights. We systematically wrote our way through all the different quaint topics: tea ceremony, Japanese slippers, Thai kickboxing, Sumo wrestling, all the cliches — and tons of little travel stories, but we were bad: we would sometimes write travel articles about places we had never been — and then just crank the stuff out. It was like vocational training for magazine hacks. I learned through sheer volume and repetition how to structure very basic magazine stories, profiles, service pieces. And then, even weirder, after a while, I was able to take some of those stories written for inflight magazines and sell them to real magazines in the US and UK, like Arena, The Face, Details, FHM. It’s sort of like I became really good in that medium — Inflight magazines — and then sort of busted out of that and into the more mainstream magazine world. But I always look back on that period as being this great education in how to make a living as a writer.

As for travel writing influences, Greenfeld jumps way back to the era of Spanish conquest in the New World:

In some ways, the best travel book I’ve ever read is Bernald Diaz des Castillo’s chronicle of the discovery and conquest of Mexico. This guy was a conquistador traveling with Cortez who wrote about the whole invasion of Mexico. Talk about a true clash of cultures, this one with everything at stake. These guys were venturing into the unknown on a chivalric quest and what they were seeing was completely beyond their imaginations — when they go meet Montezuma, the guy is grilling human hearts on a charcoal brazier, how is that for authentic? — so in a way, I think when we travel or write about travel, we are aspiring to a version of that experience.

Greenfeld’s advice to writers is that all writing — even hack work early in your career — makes you a better writer:

I was teaching for a while — hated that — and then got a job at a newspaper, the Asahi Evening News, which I don’t think was read by anyone, and I mean anyone. Our circulation was like four figures, maybe. But it was the kind of place where after a few weeks, I was writing half the newspaper — I would go to these press conferences, people like Dan Quayle or Dick Cheney, the first Bush administration, and write these terrible news stories, and I was reviewing movies, doing huge book reviews. I think I did like a 3,000 word review of two Saul Bellow novellas, for this wierd Japanese newspaper read by old ladies wanting to study English. But I was writing. And I believe that writing, all writing, makes you a better writer.

Full Karl Taro Greenfeld interview online here.