Tom Lutz is the author of many fiction, history, literary criticism, travel, photography, and philosophy books, and hundreds of short pieces in periodicals. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Riverside, where he taught creative writing, and the founding editor and publisher of Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Southwest France, with his wife, the writer Laurie Winer.
How did you get started traveling?
When I was in high school, my friend John and I would hitchhike without any destination, just letting people take us where they were headed and then turning around and hitching home. This was the 1970s, when hitchhiking was normal. When I was 18, my girlfriend’s family moved to Switzerland, so I put together $600 and spent almost a year with her wandering around Europe on a tiny motorbike. By the time I was 21 or 22 I had been to a couple dozen countries and I had hitched across the U.S. from New England to California, from the Midwest to the Northwest, and from Maine to Florida. Then I started riding freight trains across the continent. So even as a poor, marginally employed kid I got a lot of traveling in.
How did you get started writing?
I had a seventh-grade teacher who encouraged me, and I was a big reader, so I desultorily jotted things down and thought of myself as a writer without doing very much actual writing. Then, at age 25, while working as a breakfast/lunch cook at a small college, I realized there were people called professors and they read books for a living, so I started to go to college and straight through to the PhD. By that time I had published a few pieces and had the manuscript of my first book
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
That first book got a lot of great press—front page of the New York Times Book Review, interview on NPR’s All Things Considered—and that made it possible to get an agent and get some serious book contracts.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
Getting myself to stop posting my exuberance on social media. I do like the formulation of this question; it’s much better than the “travel writer” moniker. I am, in fact, “a traveler and fact/story gatherer,” whether I’m writing cultural history, criticism, travel pieces, fiction—it is all part of the same project of traveling and story gathering. And although the books can seem very different, work in very different registers and genres, they all fit under this rubric. The novels roam the globe, the histories do, too, and I think of reading great literature as form of traveling, criticism as a kind of travelogue.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Finding enough time—24 is a ridiculously inadequate number of hours in a day. My first book was a work of deep research, and my last is an 800-page behemoth that has a bibliography of some 5,000 items—I love research, and the main problem is that it is never, ever done, which of course is one of the wonderful things about it. And I love writing—the longer I’ve been at it, the more I think of the process as the goal—publication is a somewhat bothersome irritant that happens along the way, but the fun part is the writing itself.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
I had a day job as a professor, so I never had to worry about generating serious income from my books, and that allowed me to keep commercial concerns at bay and just write how and what I wanted to write. I did have a couple of successful books—not Stephen King successful, but on bestseller lists for a couple of months each—but marching to my own drummer over the years means that I’d be in serious trouble if I had to run this as a business.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
In those pre-university years, I was a cook, carpenter, bar musician, piano tuner, handyman, landscaper, farmworker, and a had a few temp jobs in factories. By the time I started grad school I had three kids, so besides my teaching stipend, I needed to continue doing that kind of work to make ends meet. As a baby professor, on a Midwest assistant professor, I needed a second income to support the family and was doing 100 gigs a year as a musician and remodeling and flipping houses now and then.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
Pico Iyer more than anyone, Bruce Chatwin, Basho, Marco Polo, the Victorians, and road novels.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone considering travel writing?
Don’t do it for the money.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
There are two—travel and writing. I love both. They are both, when things are going well, methods for total immersion and engagement.