The following is an outtake from an email Q&A interview I had with travel writer and filmmaker Ash Bhardwaj, for his 2024 book Why We Travel.
Ash Bhardwaj: What were the formative moments in your writing career?
Rolf Potts: There are many moments, big and small, that will feed into any writing career. The most significant for me was trying – and failing – to write a travel memoir when I was twenty-five years old. I had just finished an eight-month shoestring-budget van journey around North America, and I was hoping to write my own generation’s version of On the Road. I was a pretty decent writer at the sentence level, but didn’t yet comprehend the nuances of story structure. It was by trying – and failing – to create a compelling narrative of that van journey that I wrote my way into becoming a better storyteller. The book never saw the light of day (it’s still sitting in a folder in the depths of my hard drive), but it gave me instincts for all the stories, essays, and books that I would write later.
Ultimately, every writer must work through this trial-and-error phase of narrative before they can become a good storyteller. When I teach writing, I focus on story structure and keeping the reader in mind as you craft a narrative. But I think this advice ultimately pays off not in the classroom, but afterwards – in the trial-and-error process of writing, rewriting, learning from your own mistakes and shortcomings, and then rewriting again.
AB: When did you first think about running a writing workshop?
RP: I first began to think about running a writing workshop when I was invited as a travel-writing guest speaker at a workshop in Paris. This workshop was, at the time, more of a holiday writing club than it was a formally structured class – and I realized I had more in-the-field writing and publishing experience than most of the other facilitators. Teaching has been something of the family business for me (my sister and both of my parents worked as teachers), so I was able to mix my professional experience with designing a dynamic pedagogy out of the city itself. Walking through Paris neighborhoods that had inspired the likes of George Orwell and Charles Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein meant that I could call on these writers’ example in inspiring and guiding the students.
AB: What is special about a writing workshop?
RP: A great thing about an in-person writing workshop is that it offers a “community of practice” where students can be as inspired by each other as much as they are by the teacher or the pedagogy. A dozen or so people gathering in a literary city to dedicate themselves to writing for a week (or more) creates an energy that feeds everyone. It also creates accountability – a chance for talented writing students to hew to deadlines, share their work, and give each other feedback that makes them better readers of their own work. One thing I hear a lot at the end of my class sessions is that students really savored the creative energy of being around peers focused on the task of writing – and that they hope to bring that focus and inspiration home with them.
AB: How do you replicate the inspiration, creativity and exchange of ideas that happened in previous eras? Are there particular games/tools/exercises that help?
RP: Paris is a fantastic and inspiring place to study writing, in large part because of the dynamism of the writers who came before us. Thanks to Baudelaire’s 19th century writings about of the “flaneur” – that is, the urban wanderer hoping to catch him- or herself by surprise – 21st century writers can engage the city in a similar way, in a manner that benefits both their writing and their experience of the city. The same goes for Andre Breton’s early 20th-century surrealist “Exquisite Corpse” exercises, or Guy Debord’s playful mid-20th century theory of “psychogeography” – both of which make for great journaling exercises outside of the classroom. This in addition to ekphrastic writing in places like the Musée d’Orsay or Musée de Cluny, or open-ended free-writes in the same bars where Rimbaud and Verlaine drank absinthe (or where Hemingway and Fitzgerald drank Side-Car cocktails).
AB: Does travelling help creativity? How? Is it just inspiration, or something more? Does going somewhere ‘else’ to complete work (particularly writing) help? And why? Is it different to just completing a book at home or in the office?
RP: Travel is a creative act in the simple way that it displaces us – in the way that it takes us out of our own familiar places and routines and allows us a new perspective on what we consider “normal.” Travel enables what Zen philosophers call “beginner’s mind” – an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions in the face of new experiences. In experiencing the world as a child might – with engaged, optimistic, open-to-everything ignorance – your brain becomes optimized for a new kind of creativity. It is one thing to think about writing in your home office, and another task altogether to allow your creative mind to be caught by surprise in an unfamiliar place.
AB: Do certain places and spaces make serendipitous interaction and creative communities more likely? Is there something about Paris and its cafés that makes this more natural than, say, London? Or New York?
RP: One great thing about Paris is that it is both walkable and aesthetically rich, which fosters a peripatetic openness you don’t often experience in other places. I have taught travel writing with some success in places like Santa Fe and Reykjavik and San Miguel de Allende, but encouraging students to “flaneur” their way through a place is even more effective in the city that gave rise to the very concept of the flaneur. Paris very much still is, as the American critic Malcolm Cowley observed in the 1920s, “a great machine for stimulating the nerves and sharpening the senses.”
AB: How does in-person mentorship and coaching differ from remote-learning? Can Zoom call mentorship ever replace studying under a professor or attending workshops?
RP: While I far prefer the multisensory experience of in-person mentorship to the pinched audio-visual realm of Zoom, I’m a big fan of hybrid learning – that is, augmenting on-the-ground learning with Zoomed-in perspectives from writers, editors, and agents in other corners of the world. I try my best to be a generous Zoom guest for other teachers’ classes – in part because the various Zoom guest-speakers in my own Paris classes have offered a great perspective that goes beyond my own experience and expertise. At a time when technology can shrink distances, Zoom is a great way to diversify perspectives in a way that would have been logistically (and financially) impossible just one decade ago.
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