Vanuatu’s national dish, laplap (a kind of stone-cooked yam-paste pudding) is so unphotogenic that I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to eating it on my trip to the South Pacific. It probably didn’t help that travel writer J. Maarten Troost, at one point in his humorous 2007 Vanuatu memoir Getting Stoned with Savages, declared: “I hate…
For all of the shortcomings I’ve identified in Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-published first attempt at writing a travel book), it’s worth pointing out that it contained some of the earliest seeds of what later did become my first book, Vagabonding. At a certain level that makes perfect sense, as Pilgrims in a…
Travel memoir lab: How to fast-track your travel book by working with a hybrid publisher
Read any number of travel memoirs about Vanuatu, and you will find repeated use of such hard-K words as kava, kastom, cargo cults, and cannibalism (as well as such non hard-K words as volcanoes and land-diving). Oddly, these same travel memoirs only mention Christianity in passing — or, when they do mention it, they take…
Mike and Anne Howard of Honey Trek talk about working as travel influencers and content creators
In re-reading Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-published first attempt at a travel book), I’m often struck by how young the narrator seems. This makes perfect sense, of course, since the book evokes a 24-year-old version of me trying to narrate the exploits of a 23-year-old version of me. Admittedly, I didn’t feel all…
Reaching the village of Tenmaru in the Melanesian South Pacific was quite the task. First, it took Kiki and me nearly 20 hours of trans-Pacific flights to reach Vanuatu by way of Fiji. Then, because Air Vanuatu had just gone out of business, it took us 16 hours on an industrial ferry to reach the…
How tourists, influencers, and nomads transform destinations
Jenny Inzerillo of High Plains Public Radio’s “High Plains Morning” chats with actress/writer Kristen Bush about her film THE GAME CAMERA, the Rural Women Films initiative, and its artistic mission to uplift female voices in rural America. CONDENSED TRANSCRIPT Jenny Inzerillo: Folks, you are tuned to High Plains Public Radio. I am so excited to…
Though travel writing is sometimes viewed as its own, self-contained genre, its core task can pertain to all manner of prose writing, since any good narrative (fiction or nonfiction) needs to establish an effective sense of place. Place is, in effect, a character in any story, so it’s good for writers to know how to…
Travel writing has long been considered to be one of the least reliable forms of nonfiction narrative. Scholars often point to the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville as the iconic example of a classic travel book that bore little relation to truth, but skepticism about the tales of voyagers runs from Lucian’s second-century True…
