1) Vacations as we know them began in the mid-twentieth century Long enjoyed by the leisure class, vacationing was an unknown practice to most Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet by midcentury, paid leave periods, carved out for the explicit purpose of giving individuals the chance to get away for a while,…
(Originally published in Holiday Magazine, November 1967) One warm summer day I was standing on a beach near Tom Never’s Head on Nantucket. Children were splashing around in the gentle surf as their mothers lay gabbing by the Styrofoam ice chests and the Scotch Grills. About thirty yards from shore, a man paddled back and…
1) To convey a dynamic nonfiction narrative, one must build oneself into a character on the page The problem with I is not that it is in bad taste but that fledgling personal essayist and memoirists may think they have conveyed more than they actually have with that one syllable. In their minds, that I…
My travel mindset has been undergoing a walking-oriented transformation ever since I met my wife Kiki — though my yen for traveling on foot goes back to my 2002 trek across Andorra and 2000 walk across Israel, and even the summer-camp backpacking excursions of my late teens. Below are my five favorite recent Deviate episodes about…
1) As a writer your only job is to make the reader turn the page As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page. Of all the tools a writer uses to make a reader turn the page, the most essential is the plot. It doesn’t matter if the…
Twenty years ago, the skeleton of a wild pig gleamed among violets while the leaf rot around it grew hot with spring. I slipped the molar out of its grin like an oiled key and took it home, leaving the boar to reassemble, if it ever did, at a gap-toothed resurrection. I hold it up…
The World samples a half-century, peripatetically. It selects its subjects as it goes along. Its title may perhaps imply a more considered and objective collection, the sort of memoir in which a philosophically minded novelist might reflect upon his times, or a retired columnist from a quality broadsheet. Do not be deceived. This portfolio of…
In addition to interviewing other people about their travels and travel-expertise, one joy of the Deviate podcast is the opportunity it affords me to reflect on my own best travel experiences – often with the very people who went on those journeys with me many years ago. My five favorite Deviate episodes about my own…
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Asher Ross for an upcoming book from Kinfolk on souvenirs. What thoughts do you have on bringing home souvenirs for friends and family? If seeking to preserve an ephemeral experience in an object is often hopeless, even for ourselves, what does it mean to try to…
I met Kiki Bush on dating app about two months into the pandemic of 2020. I should have been off traveling in Italy that month, she should have been in Berlin; instead, we met in our shared childhood home-state of Kansas, and we had our first date on the rural property where I stay when…
(An excerpt) Travel writing is, I think, coeval with writing itself. We move and remember the place that we left; from a distance we send letters home. Those scribes who first kept laundry lists in Nineveh or Babylon, those men in Egypt naming names, belong to the one genre. An account of journeys taken or…
