1) On the way Americans call football “football” for no cogent reason Americans call football “football” because that’s what Americans want to call it. We offer no cogent clarification as to why this is, nor do we insist that other nations do the same, nor do we spend much time considering how this might seem…
I learned many things helping Kiki make her short film, The Game Camera, and I’ll share two of the more curious lessons here. First, I learned that the writer’s job is pretty much to keep out of everyone’s way once the production begins. I have almost no photos of myself on-set, and the image here…
“In teaching us to appreciate rather than accumulate – to seek awe rather than outcomes – travel can be an ongoing exercise in gratitude.” – Rolf Potts In this episode of Deviate, Rolf remixes his interview from the All the Hacks podcast, with Chris Hutchins. They discuss the concept of “Time Wealth,” how it can be actualized…
Earlier this year, around mid-October, RolfPotts.com went offline for a few days, due to a DNS glitch that happened as my webmaster was moving the site’s content to a bigger server. It was a weirdly unsettling experience, for reasons I’ll try to explain here. On having had a personal website for nearly three decades RolfPotts.com…
A full transcript of Rolf’s 2025 video essay about the role places play in cinema.
In this feature-length video essay that explores the role places play in storytelling, Rolf examines how Kansas — his home state — has been imagined, distorted, and mythologized in cinema and television for more than a century. Blending archival film clips, historical analysis, and deeply personal narration, Kansas Never Plays Itself traces how cinematic shorthand…
One of the pleasures of writing books that eventually prove popular with readers is hearing which quotes and outtakes from a book resonate with people. A little more than three years after the release of The Vagabond’s Way, here are nine quotes from the book that readers seem to enjoy quoting back to me (both…
The following Q&A about the writing life was conducted for a class project by a writing student named Josh Hammingh, who attended my undergrad alma mater in Oregon. What degree(s) do you have, and what was your major? I got a Bachelor of Arts in Writing/Literature from George Fox in 1993. Much later, after I’d…
“All the Light We Cannot See” novelist Anthony Doerr and Rolf talk about travel and writing (from 2012)
I: Pilgrims in a Sliding World For almost as long as I’ve been making my living as a writer, I’ve been telling folks about the role that failure has played in my development as an author. Specifically, my failure to write an insightful and coherent book about my first vagabonding experience – an eight-month van…
I’ve said before that one of the reasons I named my podcast Deviate (as opposed to, say, Vagabonding) was that I wanted the creative freedom to veer away from the travel issues I’ve covered as a journalist for the past 25+ years, and explore other intellectual themes. Since my interest in cinema and screenwriting is…
