A couple awaiting the arrival of their first-born delivers instead a ring-tailed lemur. They are beside themselves. The father beats the obstetrician with clenched fists. He curses the nurses and flings himself to the floor bawling. The mother stands up on the table and denounces God. The next day they go home. The lemur eats…
Excuse me if I’m a little terse here. It’s not about travel. It’s about writing. If you want to publish stories, you have to think about readers first. Why should readers pay (or even take the time) to read your stories if the writing isn’t hard and sharp, instructive and edifying? So my advice would…
Literary criticism: Travel writing has long been a part of our serious literary fabric, and perhaps more than ever, the power of travel writing to create a dialogue across cultures is crucial.
Cannery Row has been one of my favorite books ever since I first read it as a teenager. John Steinbeck’s gentle depiction of Depression-era ne’er-do-wells in Monterey, California doesn’t typically appear on lists of great American novels (and Steinbeck himself is better known for works like The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Of…
(An excerpt) Every explorer names his island Formosa, “beautiful.” To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is. But to no one else is it ever as beautiful — except the rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has…
The American road is our art, pure process of leaving. Driving doesn’t end. It only startsas the radio feeds a secret part of the brain that’s always running the American road. Our art has no destination, though it departs, and the eyes, never full, keep filling. Driving doesn’t end. It only starts when the land…
1) On New York City It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young. 2) On…
A Kansas-based travel writer on our obsession with souvenirs. Interview by Gina Kaufmann Rolf Potts, travel writer and author of Souvenir A miniature Eiffel Tower, a plastic snowglobe that encases the White House, a seashell from the beach … we don’t give much thought to souvenirs. A travel writer, who just wrote a book about souvenirs,…
Cultural criticism: Rolf Potts on tourism, kitsch, and the eternal tchotchke. Excepted from his 2018 book Souvenir.
Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to.At rest on a stair landing, They feel it Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship, Though the swell is gentle. And deep in mirrors They rediscover The face of the boy as he practices…
I try to discourage the preoccupation with “being a writer”. I don’t even let my students talk about it. The writing suffers under that kind of self-consciousness. I failed one student a Duke. His mother called me and said, “He doesn’t usually fail. He’s a good student, and he wants to be a writer.” I…
