Key Takeaways
- One of my all-time favorite travel writers is Don George. He’s not a big name like Bryson or Pico Iyer, but his influence in travel writing is everywh
- I first met Don about five years ago at a writer’s conference. Don’s ability to be descriptive and vivid, and convey a sense of place when writing ast
- If there’s any writer I aspire to tell a story like, it’s him. (Sorry, Bryson. You’re #2!)
One of my all-time favorite travel writers is Don George. He’s not a big name like Bryson or Pico Iyer, but his influence in travel writing is everywhere and goes back decades. He’s been editor of The San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, literally wrote the book on travel while writing for Lonely Planet, is an editor-at-large for National Geographic, and started the Book Passage Travel Writers conference!
I first met Don about five years ago at a writer’s conference. Don’s ability to be descriptive and vivid, and convey a sense of place when writing astounds me. He draws you in in a way very few travel writers can. (And he’s a really nice guy, too!)
If there’s any writer I aspire to tell a story like, it’s him. (Sorry, Bryson. You’re #2!)
Last year, Don finally published a book called The Way of Wanderlust. It’s a collection of his best short stories. I read it earlier this year and, today, we’re here with the man himself to talk about his book, travel writing, and much more:
Route for Less: Tell everyone about yourself and how you became a travel writer!
Don: In high school and college, I wanted to be a poet. I didn’t even know “travel writer” was a real profession. After graduating from Princeton, I went to Europe for a year, interning for the summer in Paris and then teaching in Athens for a year.
A piece I wrote in a grad school nonfiction writing workshop about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro (which I did on my way back to the US from Athens) got published in Mademoiselle magazine. And suddenly I started thinking about writing stories based on my travels. I began to write more travel stories while teaching for two years in Japan.
When I returned to the US, through an incredible series of serendipities, I ended up being hired by the San Francisco Examiner while the travel editor was on a leave of absence. And that’s how I became a travel writer.
What made you finally decide to put your best work in a book?
I’d been thinking of doing this for a while, but I never had the luxury of free time to make this collection happen. In 2012, at the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference, I met a wonderfully talented young writer-artist named Candace Rose Rardon, who, over two and a half years, helped me find and organize my hundreds of published stories, choose which ones to include, and determine the final shape of the book.
And she created the beautiful, wanderlust-ful cover illustration for the book, as well as transporting maps and sketches for the inside pages!
Now that this book has been published, it has come to mean more to me than I could possibly have imagined. It feels tremendously rounding and fulfilling. I’m absolutely exhilarated to have my life — my travels, my writings, my philosophy — out in the world in this very palpable way, between two covers.
How come you didn’t write a memoir or novel?
Well, this really is my memoir. For my whole professional life, I’ve been a travel writer. I go out into the world, have adventures, make connections, and bring back stories. And I always put the best stories into my writing. So these stories, collectively, are my memoir.
For me, writing about reality — trying to evoke and understand my own experience as completely and deeply as possible — is more appealing and fulfilling than fiction.
Why do you think people consume travel books so frequently? Some of the top-selling books always seem to be about travel.
I think many people love to travel and they can’t always travel actually, so the next best alternative is traveling vicariously, through someone else’s account of his or her travels. Other people love the idea of travel — of experiencing foreign places and cultures — but without the inconveniences and hardships of the journey.
For them, too, travel literature is the perfect solution: they get the excitement and learning of travel without the mosquitoes and mystery meals.
So, you’ve been in the writing industry for a while. What’s changed?
I could write a book about that. Actually, I have written a book about it. Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Writing, which I first wrote in 2005 and which I updated extensively for its third edition a couple of years ago, goes into great detail about changes in the writing and publishing part of the travel industry over the past two decades.
As for the larger travel industry, the changes have been enormous, seismic, but I think the biggest change is instantaneous connectivity, which has its good and bad aspects. Compared with when I began world-wandering 40 years ago, it’s infinitely easier to get information about the world now, and to make and maintain connections around the globe.
But on the other hand, whether you are at home or on the road, it’s infinitely easier to get distracted by technology and connectivity — tweeting and Instagramming every moment — so that you miss the deep essence of the world around you. The kind of immersive, lose-yourself-to-a-place travel that I like to practice doesn’t lend itself very well to non-stop Facebook updates.
Much as I love connecting with people at home and around the globe on social media, the real richness of travel for me is in plumbing the depth of the moment, being entirely present, taking the world into me and losing myself to the world at the same time.
What are some of the failings you see with online travel writing and blogging?
The main failing I see is the same failing I’ve seen for years in the unsolicited submissions I’ve received as a travel editor: the writer doesn’t know the point of what he or she is writing. If you as a writer don’t know your point, there’s no way I as a reader am going to take away a point.
