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…
1) On the edifying mission of pre-tourism travel Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment. 2) On the aesthetic compromises of modern travel I don’t want to sound too gloomy, but there’s…
Between 2013 and 2019 I conducted occasional interviews with my mother, Alice Potts, about various aspects of her life. I did this out of the conviction that once the people you love are gone, you won’t have the chance to ask them the kind of simple questions about their lives that you can (but often…
Note: This encore episode is dedicated to the memory of Alice Potts, who died on August 20, 2025, aged 81. “In America aging is often seen as an insult rather than an inevitable human process. We don’t celebrate getting older; we ‘fight’ age by pretending to be young.” –Rolf Potts In this episode of Deviate Rolf…
When my mother, Alice Potts, died last month, part of the process of working through my grief came in digging into the archive of digital files I have collected over the years to document her life. This ritual was in part an endeavor to eulogize her in a way that honored who she was, but…
My mother, Alice Potts, died peacefully last month in her memory-care assisted-living apartment in Salina, Kansas. She was 81 years old, and had in recent years been dealing with dementia (which was compounded of late by cerebral hemorrhages). Mom grew up the oldest of six on a farm near the town of Aliceville in eastern…
