1) On why humans seek out stories We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us, to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality. We do not wish to escape…
Shot List 1. Night. River. subtitle: It was for such a night she had waited. 2. Trunk of her car is open and lit by a funnel of light from the porch. 3. She loads the trunk: 4×6 trays, photographic papers, strobe light. Strobe doesn’t fit, she angles it into the backseat. 4. She is…
1) On authenticity Now suppose some loon comes up and says: “Have you found the real Asia?” It is all real as far as I can see. Though certainly a lot of it has been corrupted by the West. Neither Victorian Darjeeling nor the Kennedy-era Oberoi can be called ideal Asia. I remember Deki Lhalungpa…
For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and especially, cut, is essential. It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp. –Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer (2006) This sentence…
A little more than seven years ago, I wrote “travel stunt” essay — “Around the World in 80 Hours (of Travel TV)” — that recounted the experience of holing up in a Las Vegas hotel room for one week and spending all of my waking hours watching the Travel Channel. The experience was uniformly awful,…
Friends and vagabonders, Here’s a rundown of what I’ve been working on of late — including my Deviate with Rolf Potts podcast; my new book, Souvenir; and upcoming creative writing classes in Paris and Santa Fe. Podcast: Deviate with Rolf Potts Deviate, which debuted last November (and has since surpassed a quarter of a million downloads), features engaging, off-topic…
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…
