Angelique Stevens is Six-Nations Native American living in Upstate New York, where she teaches creative writing, literature of genocide, and race literatures. Her nonfiction can be found in or is forthcoming in LitHub, The New England Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and a number of anthologies. She has been chosen for several writing awards and fellowships, including the Grand Prize in the Solas Award for Best Travel Writing, The Bread Loaf Carol Houck Smith Returning Contributor Award, Kenyon Review’s Peter Taylor Fellowship for Nonfiction, and a Fellowship in Nonfiction at Bennington College, where she also earned her MFA. She also holds an MA in Literature from SUNY Brockport. She finds her inspiration in wandering—being in places that push the boundaries of comfort, experience, knowledge, and hunger. She is currently writing a memoir about her experiences growing up in New York State.
How did you get started traveling?
I received a scholarship in the inaugural year of the Gates Millennium Scholars (GMS) Program, which allowed me to go to any college I wanted. I chose a program through Long Island University where students live in a region of the world outside of their own and develop their own educational program and methodology. The school’s philosophy was grounded in Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and John Dewey’s Experience and Education. As students, we lived in home stays, we learned through experience rather than in classrooms, and we developed our own course of learning and methodology; all of it was deeply rooted in human rights.
I had never been to another country, let alone experienced immediate immersion in a new culture. It changed my life profoundly. Not only did I learn how to live in a different culture, but I learned how to travel in ways that didn’t make me an obvious tourist. I took the bus, I walked, I stayed in home-stays, on weekends or on month-long trips, we learned how to backpack and decrease our carbon footprint. We volunteered where we could, and we learned the histories of the countries we were living in.
How did you get started writing?
I traveled solo to South East Asia for two months. In Thailand, I hiked all seven levels of Erawan Falls by myself. The hike became increasingly harder at each level, which meant seeing fewer and fewer people the more I climbed. By the time I hit level four or five it was just me by myself trusting the worn path and my balance over some of the scarier passageways. I understood even as I was ascending solo that everything about that hike felt like a metaphor for life. When I got to the top of that mountain, it was glorious, I was the only one to go into that little pool of perfectly green water under a full sun and feel the spray from the falls. That moment was a beautiful validation that if I could climb that little mountain, I could do anything. And I wanted to share that feeling.
But that’s not how travel works. It’s never really that glorious, especially the kind of travel I do. By the time I got to the bottom of that mountain, I had a 100-degree fever from drinking bad water a few days earlier. An hour later, after I took the train to my little four-room B&B in the jungle, my temperature was up to 105 degrees. I was so sick that night, I was delirious, shaking and sobbing and crying in a corner. I imagined myself dying alone in that place. There was no Wi-Fi or service. No one knew where I was, except the woman who owned the B&B and who made me soup and checked in on me often. Thankfully, I brought antibiotics and other meds. 18 hours later, my fever broke. And that was only week one. It was clear to me, after that, that I needed to write about it, and I needed to keep writing.
Later during that trip, I started researching travel writing and courses. The next summer I took Rolf’s one-month class in Paris, and two years after that I applied to Bennington College for an MFA.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
I wrote a little piece about a weekend photo tour I took in Cambodia. I revised that essay for months and months. By the time I neared the end, I was obsessive, cutting every unnecessary word, polishing and smoothing until I reached the point where it felt beautiful, like I could do nothing else to it. I had written hundreds and hundreds of pages before that and never saw my writing in that way. So, I sent it off to a little lit publication and it got accepted, it even won the silver in the Solas Award for Best Women’s Travel Writing.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
I learned very early on that you might think you’ll remember an important moment, but two weeks or two months later, when you want to remember what color shirt the guy was wearing, or what direction the sun was setting, or the correct spelling of a person’s name or village, your brain has been doing other things in the meantime that recolor all of those memories. Taking copious notes is so important.
I’ve also learned to keep a recorder nearby, not necessarily to record people talking, but to record the atmosphere of any moment, someone singing a song walking through the countryside, the incessant horns of a busy intersection, the chirping of cicadas on a late August afternoon, the early morning doves cooing echoes in between buildings.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Nothing about the writing process is easy for me. I’m a shitty first-drafter. I don’t plan. I’m not systematic. I write what feels right, about what seemed important, and I don’t always know what it means when I start. I just know I need to start. And, if I have the endurance, I’ll push through several drafts and several workshopped versions until a light clicks, and then I understand why I needed to write it. Research is a normal part of everything I do. Sometimes I might think I don’t need it, but I’ve learned that it often helps jumpstart the writing process. Ultimately, for me, writing is a labor of love. I push through all that hard work just for that click in the end.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
I think the biggest challenge for any writer is marketing. Writing is what we do, even if it is laborious and time consuming. But the work doesn’t end when the piece is complete. Sometimes it feels like it’s all just starting at that point. Now you have to figure out where you’re going to send it, who might take that type of writing. Then you have to have a cover letter and a pitch and a network. All of that takes so much time. I’m surprised sometimes that anybody ever goes into this business.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
I’m crazy-lucky in that writing is not my day job. I’ve been teaching literature and writing at a community college for a long time. That job affords me a lot of time to travel in the summers and in the winters. It also gives me the privilege of only doing the kind of writing that I like to do and not the kind of writing many writers have to do to make money.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
Besides you, Rolf, I’ve read many travel authors. I love especially people who go against everything and set off on their own. Kira Salak’s Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu was jaw-dropping and I recently finished Jeffrey Gettlemen’s Love Africa which was astounding.
But I can’t talk about travel authors without also talking about non travel authors. I’ll never forget when I read Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, a beautiful discourse on Mexico, as if the place itself had its own identity. I was in Chiapas studying the Zapatistas through my program at Long Island University—a program I had created for myself—”peace and human rights through writing.” I was living alone in a small B&B and doing so much of my own work in solitude. In one of the opening chapters Paz talks about a conversation in the U.S. in which his friend told him, “if I say bugambilia to you, you think of the bougainvillea vines you’ve seen in your own village, with their purple, liturgical flowers, climbing around an ash tree or hanging from a wall in the afternoon sunlight. They’re part of your being, your culture. They’re what you remember long after you’ve seemed to forget them. It’s very lovely here, but it isn’t mine.” At the time, I understood this in a way I couldn’t have if I were still living in the United States. I understood that so much of language is embedded in culture, so much of movement and philosophy and thought is embedded in culture—in place— and in songs, television, books, plays, everyday interactions between people. It was that very realization opened up a whole world for me.
I understood then that even if I did embed myself in a place, I may never fully be able to articulate its identity and I should never expect to, especially as an outsider. That is both beautiful and tragic. But I realized also that reading books by authors from the country is so important. And there are so many amazing books I’ve read that are centered on place: anything by V.S Naipul; anything by Jorge Luis Borges; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart; Chimamanda Adiche’s Half of a Yellow Sun; Nafisi Azar’s Reading Lolita in Tehran; Marjane Satrape’s Persepolis; Anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner… I could do this for days
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
Find out who does the thing you want to do well, and follow that person. Study them, read them, talk to them, expand your network. Try to see the world from a lens that is not your own.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
I think what’s more rewarding than the adventure itself is sharing it with others.
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