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),…
“A joke is kind of like a little life-lesson in addition to being funny. If your joke is really good, there’s a little nugget of truth in it.” – Cedar Van Tassel In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Cedar discuss why kids want to be paleontologists and astronauts, and the existential “book” Cedar wrote when he…
Amid our Vienna sojourn a few months ago, Kiki and I saw all manner of kitschy Mozart and Freud and Klimt socks for sale — and at the Leopold Museum Kiki splurged on a pair of socks depicting Egon Schiele’s 1910 “Self-Portrait with Striped Shirt.” I have a weakness for these socks myself. While visiting…
1) Solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity Solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity. Alone one’s thoughts wander freely over space. In the presence of others they are pulled back by an awareness of other personalities who project their own worlds onto the same area. 2) Place is…
“When we don’t foster local filmmaking traditions, we end up making movies about what we think life is like in the cities we do see movies about.” – Jason Bailey In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Jason talk about how being from Kansas influenced their careers as travel writers and film critics, and the long cultural…
