Talking travel writing, solo journeys, and Kerouac: 4 new Rolf interviews online

Since departing on my European and North American travels earlier this summer, I’ve done a number of interviews that have appeared in print and online — including a podcast about solo travel for SmarterTravel.com, a Q&A about breaking into travel writing for KiwiWriter, and a personality profile for the newspaper of my adopted hometown.

A fourth interview, with Tim Patterson of Brave New Traveler, touches on a number of topics, including being compared to Jack Kerouac, and travel writing in the Internet Age. I tell Tim that my career might not have been possible without the Internet:

As for writing in the Internet Age, this might be a tough thing to analyze, since I got my start in the Internet Age, and I owe the genesis of my writing career to the Internet. …This allows for immediacy of reportage – some of the stories I’ve written for Salon and Slate went live just hours after I lived them. Plus, through my website, each story becomes part of a greater narrative of my accumulated wanderings. Twenty years ago, an interesting magazine article about someone’s journey might have been read, enjoyed and quickly forgotten; now, someone who reads my stories online in Slate or Outside or World Hum can link to my website and read 70-80 more stories from other parts of the planet. This inadvertently adds to the Kerouac mystique: instead of seeing me as a journalist writing a one-off story from some part of the world, my readers can easily discern that I’ve made an entire lifestyle out of travel.

In the interview, I also explain the “hum of possibility” that comes with a long-term journey:

The “hum of possibility” is the feeling that anything can happen at any moment — a heady openness to the new and unexpected. It’s hard to experience this feeling at home, since home life is made more efficient and manageable by certain self-insulating patterns and routines. That’s why at home we fall into these little rituals of low-stakes possibility, like going to bars to meet people, or dabbling in new fads or hobbies. That’s all great; I’m not knocking the patterns of home-life. But on the road the potential for new experience is so much more powerful and real. You can challenge yourself: reeducate yourself, reconsider yourself, reinvent yourself if you want to. Embracing this sense of challenge and newness — which may be nothing more complicated than wandering off the obvious tourist trail — can send your worldview and even your outlook on life into new directions. It’s a somewhat intimidating, yet invariably intoxicating feeling that follows you as you travel.

The full interviews mentioned above can be found in the following places:

• “Podcast: How to plan for your first solo trip,” by Christine Sarkis, SmarterTravel.com
• “Interview with travel writer Rolf Potts,” by Liz Lewis, WriteToTravel.blogspot.com
• “Globetrotter says wealth lies in experiences,” by David Clouston, The Salina Journal
• “Rolf Potts On The Future Of Travel Writing,” by Tim Patterson, Brave New Traveler