A thoughtful 20-minute interview with the “Eat, Pray, Love” author covering MFA programs and her novel-in-progress, which she refers to at one point as “another travel book.”
Today we introduce the Travel Story Hall of Fame, an occasional series in which we honor the best in travel writing new and old.
Title: The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment
Author: Jonathan Stern
Publication: The New Yorker
Date: April 24, 2006
Nomination Speech: I first read Jonathan Stern’s Shouts and Murmurs piece in “The Best American Travel Writing 2007,” but its tone, its language and sub-heads were all weirdly familiar, as though I’d read the story before. That eerie sense of recognition is a sure sign of a well-executed satire.
Meet the strange land of My Apartment, whose “vast expanse of unfurnished space can be daunting at first, and its population of one difficult to communicate with.” Under “Places to Eat,” Stern notes that “tourists often flock to the salvaged wooden telephone-cable spool in front of the TV as a convenient dining spot. More adventurous eaters might try standing over the sink, as the locals do. If you’re willing to venture off the beaten track, there’s balancing your plate on the arm of the couch or using the toilet lid as a makeshift table.”
Years later, “The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment” remains one of the funniest pieces of travel writing I’ve ever read.
Excerpt:
ORIENTATION
My Apartment’s vast expanse of unfurnished space can be daunting at first, and its population of one difficult to communicate with. After going through customs, you’ll see a large area with a couch to the left. Much of My Apartment’s “television viewing” occurs here, as does the very occasional making out with a girl (see “Festivals”). To the north is the food district, with its colorful cereal boxes and antojitos, or “little whims.”
I’m on the road this week, doing some writing and social media work for the Yukon Quest.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Quest is a 1,000-mile sled dog race that runs from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon (my hometown). I’m following along, and on the trail with me is a traveling crowd of volunteers, veterinarians, race officials, “handlers” (assistants to the mushers), and friends and family. We drive from checkpoint to checkpoint, meeting up with the dog teams whenever they intersect with the sparse road system. I’m writing this from Central Corner, an outpost on the Steese Highway just south of the one-time Gold Rush town of Circle City.
Never seen a long-distance dog sled race? Here’s a video that gives you a real sense of the scene at the start line back in Fairbanks:
Spring and summer are fast approaching, and that means warmer days, Major League Baseball and, yes, travel writing conferences. Gadling recently noted several upcoming conferences. Among them:
Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX)
The annual travel blogger gathering created by Kim Mance lays claim to being “the world’s premiere and largest conference of travel bloggers, writers, and new media creators.” Discussions and workshops explore the art and business of travel blogging, including ethical considerations and social media best practices. For many, it’s a reunion, of sorts: Bloggers who’ve been tweeting at one another for the last year can finally catch up in person. This year’s conference takes place June 15-17 in Keystone, Colorado. (Luasanne, Switzerland will also host a TBEX gathering in October.)
The Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference
Co-founded by veteran travel editor Don George, the four-day Book Passage conference just north of San Francisco has focused on great writing and photography for 20 years. It features panel discussions, specialized learning tracks, readings, dinners and convivial nightly gatherings. Faculty members in recent years have included Tim Cahill, Spud Hilton, David Farley and yours truly. This year, Susan Orlean will be on hand. It takes place Aug. 9-12 in Corte Madera, California.
Also worth noting:
Travel Classics Writers Conferences
These conferences are open only to professional writers and feature editors from a number of glossy magazines. Writers must submit an application to attend and show they’ve been published in at least three magazines in the last year-and-a-half. The next conference takes place June 7-12 in Cardiff, Wales.
Finally, if you want to hone your writing skills but don’t want to travel to a conference, consider taking a travel writing class at a local bookstore or university.
Several World Hum contributors were also among the winners. Larry Bleiberg took Gold in the Historical or Hobby Travel category, while Daisann McLane received a Gold award for Cultural, Educational or Self-Improvement Travel. Lola Akinmade Akerstrom received two Gold awards—one for Personality and Profiles and one for Culinary Travel—and Wayne Curtis also received a Silver award for Culinary Travel.
Like so many people, I’ve been glued to PBS’ “Downton Abbey” and the scheming and backstabbing unfolding in Highclere Castle. Here, series creator Julian Fellowes discusses his favorite room in the castle: the library. I love his take on it. The French have their drawing rooms. The Austrians have their ballrooms. Libraries, he says, are the rooms the English get right.
At Old World Wandering, Iain Manley has a long, worthwhile post on the classic overlander, mixing his personal experiences as a “novice traveller” on the route with a history of the trail’s literature, from “Across Asia on the Cheap” all the way back to the Romantics of the 1700. Here’s a taste:
I knew something of the old Hippie Trail by the time we arrived in Goa, but only as much as I had read in Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar. Theroux had encountered the freaks making their way out east - “like small clans of tribesmen setting out for a baraza or new pastures” - on a train from Istanbul to Tehran. He thought “the majority of them, going for the first time, had that look of frozen apprehension that is the mask on the face of an escapee,” and had “no doubt that the teenaged girls who made up the bulk of these loose tribal groups would eventually appear on the notice boards of American consulates in Asia, in blurred snapshots or retouched high-school graduation pictures: missing person and have you seen this girl?” Theroux, propped up on his first-class berth “like a pasha,” consulting Nagel’s Encyclopaedia-Guide, or lying down in the heat, “like a Hindu widow on a pyre, resigned to suttee,” was too much of a prig to characterise the hippies as anything but wastrels and strays, and it seemed a pity that the Hippie Trail had never had a Kerouac to document it, to tell us as he did that “somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”
Andy Murdock has been brainstorming some much-needed new travel words. For instance, “comeuppants,” a noun for those times when “an obnoxious person loses their luggage and has no change of clothes.” Or “trambunctious,” possibly my favorite of the bunch, an adjective describing someone who is “overly excited by riding trains, funiculars, and other forms of public transport.” Funny stuff all around.
This is a favorite, much-kicked-around topic of mine, as relevant to travel writers as to more stationary memoirists. Earlier this week the folks at The Rumpus added a fresh contribution to the debate.
Messing With Memoir is an essay about the author’s efforts to revise her out-of-print memoir, years after she’d written it, and the ethical issues she grappled with in doing so. Here’s a taste:
I was a much better writer now. Why let that raw, earnest, adverb-friendly, long-sentenced version of myself linger? With e-books and Print on Demand (POD) as a garrote, I could quietly, efficiently off her. In her place I would seat that wiser, more skilled self.
But was it ethical? I had never heard of anyone tampering with their memoir. A memoir is not only an account of your life, it is specifically an account of your remembrances of your life. So now I would be telling that same story fifteen years later. I was re-remembering a memory.
Even more important, a memoir is a reflection of who you are at the time of writing. But now I would be peering backwards at myself from a new vantage point. Isn’t there a different author (older, wiser me) now? And haven’t I now changed my main character by writing her with this new hand? Did this matter?
Touching on the same theme in one of his “Daily Rumpus” emails a few days back, editor Stephen Elliott wrote about “the only true rule of memoir”:
You cannot knowingly tell a lie. In other words, you can be wrong, you can write things you consider to be true that other people consider to be untrue. In fact, it’s impossible to do otherwise. Most truth is not factual; most truth is subjective. But to state a something as fact when you know it is not, ie. I spent this much time in jail, is to break the cardinal rule.
I think that gets it about right. For more, check out Tom Bissell’s essay on truth and travel literature, Truth in Oxiana.
Arab American composer Mohammed Fairouz watched the uprising in Tahrir Square on TV a year ago today. As he looked on, with the volume off, he began composing a piece of music. “Tahrir for Clarinet and Orchestra,” now complete, is “the first movement of what will eventually become a concerto in three movements,” according to a fascinating report on PRI’s The World.
You can hear the movement in its entirety below, but the radio segment is well worth a listen, particularly Fairouz discussing the various facets of the uprising he was trying to evoke through the music.
