Life is a joy! I’m newly returned to the states after my fairly brief Euro tour between Amsterdam and Metz, France. In Metz, I had the privilege of co-teaching a class on travel writing on the Georgia Tech (“MIT of the South”) campus there with the one and only Dr. Jennifer Orth-Veillon. She is the director of a very cool program for students taking a less structured beat abroad before participating in a normal college degree regimen. Jen and I know each other through MilSpeak, our mutual publisher, and the stars aligned for me to guest appear during a class. Check out her WWI anthology here.
I was a little nervous as I still consider myself a newbie author and am just now dipping my toes in the teaching world. But the 40ish students were great and I knew we were making ground as the whole thing evolved into a lively discussion with a bunch of questions. I tried to communicate a few core ideas that have benefitted me between readings from my books and the chats.
Travel Writing (My Take)
The exact quotables of the session with the students are hazy, but here are a few main themes I tried to lay down:
Talk to strangers
I advised the students to talk to strangers. This was advice my dad gave me when I was taking my gap year back in 2008-2009 after high school with a solo globe circling itinerary. There is pervasive, and I would say intense, societal pressure to not interact much with strangers. Most people don’t even say hello when sitting next to someone on a 10-hour airplane ride.
Personally, I find this element of society horrifying and dehumanizing. But in the context of travel writing, talking to strangers is less of a morality question and more a key component of the craft. Did you really experience a place if you didn’t have a real conversation with someone there—specifically someone you didn’t hire to do a task for you?
Just talking to my train neighbors on this last European trip was worth it from both human and writing perspectives. On my train from Amsterdam to Paris, my neighbor was a nice Macedonian dwelling woman about my age. She shared a story of swimming in bioluminescence at a Netherlands beach with friends and was reading a poetry anthology The Nightingales are Drunk. When I asked if she liked it, she commented that it was odd how much it complemented another book she was reading. We talked of serendipity and wished each other well.
Another train neighbor, this one on a train departing from Paris for Amsterdam, was a bespectacled old timer with a denim jacket and moderately long blonde hair. He was a Utrecht-based painter who just finished a sailing trip in the Azores. We fellow sailing artists talked of AI—he was worried about it but I told him to bring it on, for if we artists lose the contest for the love of the common man then we deserve it. We spent most of the time gazing at the passing countryside together, almost like an elderly couple on a porch watching the street. When he spoke of Paris, his heart clearly yearned for her even though we were at Gare du Nord not 10 minutes past. He showed me a picture of one of his paintings and I’m still not sure how to describe it, but I’m confidant AI will only be able to cheaply imitate it as a sham parlor trick. I gave him a copy of my book.
See what I’m getting at here, young students and travelers all? Talk. To. Strangers.
Center the place, don’t write “me”moir selfie
Let’s face it, we live in a time of “me”moir and selfie culture. While weaving in personal narrative threads in travel writing is often awesome and even important, the good stuff I like centers the place itself on the same level as a main character. In my book Salmon in the Seine, I really tried to elevate 2008 Alaska—and her denizens, nature, etc.—as a, if not the, main character. Reflections about myself are restrained. You’ll not find entire chapters waxing about my suburban childhood. Not everything that happens revolves around my feelings or sense of self. The coming of age, “finding myself” thread is there, but I’d not reduce the entire universe I experienced to a servant of my ego.
I don’t entirely blame folks for leaning into the “me”moir and selfie culture. There are prominent examples both in published works and social media that have been wildly successful. But I’m of the mind that we’re on the back end of the trend. What worked during the first wave of Insta-famous jet setting cuties and Eat, Pray, Love knockoffs 10 years ago isn’t new anymore, it’s trite—very 2013 and it’s 2023. The world and the people in it ain’t a bag you barf into and then throw away for your own personal edification, ok?
Heck, no spoilers, but a lesson at the end of my book as I gaze at the stars from the banks of a stream in Denali is that the universe doesn’t revolve around me. And you know what? That’s a good thing. Thinking otherwise was giving me a fair bit of existential grief.
“Almost as an afterthought, I realized I knew all that I needed to know… I saw the first stars of the Alaskan night for what they were, not what I wanted them to be, and tried to decipher the many animal tracks in the mud around me to learn their stories.”
The stars and the tracks are the story. I’m just the conduit by which the reader gets to see them as I did.
Journal. Journal. Journal.
The first draft of my book was literally my transcribed journal, which was surprisingly excellent. I think 18-year-old me was better at journalling that I am today at 33, he so earnestly in the moment as a full-time reporter and I clocking in a few entries a week. Younger me paraphrased conversations, described environments, and even noted pounds of salmon caught per day and where. Relax, kid!
Teasing out the narrative after the transcription was the bulk of the real work, but thanks to the excellent journal I had a strong foundation to work from. Without the journal, I also would’ve had to fictionalize the book as I just wouldn’t be able to recall the experience with enough accuracy to credibly call it memoir. The true to life element is what gives the book weight to me, so this was invaluable.
So if you’re an aspiring travel writer, you better be journaling your butt off. That journal ought to be within reach 90% of the time. It’s also a good litmus test to see if you actually like travel writing. If keeping a simple journal is a big chore, why the heck would you want to try to write a book or publish a blog?! Those things are far more effort.
Journal. Journal. Journal.
Bad fortune makes great stories—unfortunately!
A funny curse of literary journalism, travel writing, memoir, and other real life writing is that bad developments for you often translates to good stories for the reader. Have you ever been riveted by a short story about a nice, well to-do family who took a cruise to the Bahamas and everything went perfectly to plan for five days of Christmas card moments? I doubt it.
Now imagine the same setup, but grandma is held hostage by revolutionaries on one of the impoverished tropical islands that the ship visited. Or the whole family gets a rare flesh eating disease and are quarantined on the pool deck while the rest of the guests watch. Or dad gets into an affair with a washed up, chain-smoking standup comic. Mom falls off the boat and dies.
These are all terrible things to happen to a real family, but man, are they great stories—especially if they’re true. So while I don’t advise anybody to go out into the world looking for trouble, being aware of this cosmically humorous rule of thumb is no bad thing. If you happen to loose your bag due to a cut purse in Rome, maybe an article about the experience and the cut purse culture would be popular while the story of you enjoying the Coliseum would not. I’ve said it before—I don’t know if there is a God, but the universe certainly has a sick sense of humor.
On structure, this dumb diagram that I whipped up
There were a few great questions from students about how to structure travel writing. Indeed, hammering a trip into a compelling story can be a challenge even if you do all the above: talk to strangers, decenter yourself, journal, and experience some juicy misfortune. I ended up improvising this silly Venn diagram and it grew on me.
You see, there are many writers and there are many let’s call them “Perspective X”s, but that sweet spot is pretty rare. I cited Anthony Bourdain in class, who was both a writer and a chef. By leaning into his lived expertise, he formed a really special and beloved outlook in his writing that saw the world and humanity through the lens of food. In my own work, a sea salty background that includes gigs on different vessels, a marine science degree, living aboard sailboats, etc. has complemented my writing to make it unique.
So think about that X factor and start simple. Did you do swim in high school? Use that perspective when taking a dip in the local lake in rural France with the locals. Do you like gardening? Bring that into the equation when wandering a famous London park. You’ll be writing on familiar turf and may have something special to say a normie reader may not get elsewhere.
Note also the parallel lines labelled “Literary Journalism”. These threads of current events and macrolevel journalism can really tie things together. In my book, I experienced the angry community of Cordova, Alaska, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s adjudication of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill. At the time, I was just a teenager noting how mad everyone was. But later in life and in the published book, I cited a few articles about the case and dove into the topic in greater depth to flesh it out.
I think this approach is a proven way to transform one person’s lived experience into something far more important, i.e., a story of the world, of a nation or a people. If applicable, why not tie in a thread about the ongoing rise in cost of livability? Or the Ukrainian War? To reiterate, it has to apply properly. But in one’s travels, especially if talking to strangers and something is mentioned, this can really punch up a piece. If you are in Vietnam and you hit if off with someone who lost a leg to an American mine, that writing has a deeper layer to it right off the bat.
Norris Reads: A Friend’s Manuscript I Can’t Really Talk About!
I’m reading a friend’s manuscript that I can’t talk about this week, so Norris Reads this week is a bit lacking. Forgive me! But brace yourself for some good stuff this fall, I’m just getting started around here. Until then, bon voyage.