When Annie Dillard died at age 81 last week, I immediately thought of my father, who kept a copy of her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on our family bookshelf. My dad, a science teacher, saw Annie Dillard as a nature writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau. When I eventually…
A few times each year, a reporter from some traditional venue (outlets like Reuters or the Washington Post or Foreign Policy) will reach out to me, as a veteran travel writer, for my professional perspective about some aspect of the travel experience. Since I find travel and tourism to be endlessly fascinating, these interviews are…
“That first day in Mumbai, there was the slum to the side of us, there were sports cars that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars next to people walking with no feet next to 200 people crammed into a bus. Separating those layers in a nuanced way lifts the writing that shows that…
On nostalgia On travel photographs On human nature On the souvenir trade On mortality More about the book
By Rolf Potts Back in 1981, when I was ten years-old and in the fourth grade, I drew a poster that illustrated everything I loved and hated about the world. For some reason I’ve kept it after all these years, and not too long ago I hung it up in the mudroom of my house.…
“All writing is trying to destroy a stereotype, and the individual that you’re writing about — the figure in the landscape — is actually the ideal.” —Paul Theroux Paul Theroux‘s highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, My Other Life, and The Mosquito Coast. His 1975 book The Great Railway Bazaar is credited with revitalizing the genre of literary travel writing, and…
(author’s note, 2026) The following short story was published in the August/September 1998 issue of an online literary magazine called Eclectica. While fictional, the story is a roman à clef evocation of a certain time in my life, when I was coming to terms with the fact that the manuscript for my first travel book…
Back in 2005, when I moved into my prairie double-wide in rural Kansas, I bought a sturdy used desk at the local DAV Thrift Store for $35. Over the course of the next 20 years, I worked at that desk almost every day, when I wasn’t off traveling the world — and in fact I…
“”When I was in the third grade my teacher announced to our class that Ronald Reagan had been shot. When she asked if we had questions, I raised my hand and asked her if the Indiana – North Carolina basketball game was still going to happen that night.” – Chuck Klosterman In this episode of Deviate, Rolf,…
1) Never explain something you can dramatize Master storytellers never explain. They do the hard, painfully creative thing — they dramatize. Audiences are rarely interested, and certainly never convinced, when forced to listen to the discussion of ideas. Dialogue, the natural talk of characters pursuing desire, is not a platform for the filmmaker’s philosophy. Explanations…
One interesting footnote to the journey Kiki and I made through Switzerland and Austria a few months ago was that we accidentally traversed the micro-nation of Liechtenstein as our train made its way from Chur to Innsbruck. Liechtenstein didn’t announce its borders (nor were its flags flying in any of the communities we passed through),…
