Smoking will soon be banned from indoor public spaces in Paris. Is a museum dedicated to the classic French habit a celebration or eulogy?
The Death of the Mile-High Club
Commentary: Regardless of how you try to sugarcoat the flight experience, planes have functionally become flying buses — and the only people who would consider having sex on public buses are invariably on their way home from serving 18-to-24-month prison sentences for crystal-meth possession.
Update: Spring/Summer/Fall 2007
Friends and vagabonders, 2007 promises to be a busy year of traveling, writing and teaching for me. Having returned from Cuba and the Dominican Republic this spring, I will head for Europe this summer, where I will teach writing classes in Russia (at the Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg) and France (at my annual…
6 Answers About Life As a Professional Travel Writer
The Write To Travel blog recently interviewed me about my experiences as a professional travel writer. The Q&A format mimicked the questions I ask writers in my own Travel Writers series, and our resulting exchange might be termed “6 Answers About Life As a Professional Travel Writer.” Here’s what was discussed: 1) Did you always want…
How My Travel Writing Career Got Started
For the past seven years, I’ve been asking my various travel writer interview subjects how they got started writing. Frank Bures recently asked me that same question for a travel-writing class he’s teaching, and this is what I told him: My writing aspirations can be traced back to about age 13, when I started writing…
The Dangers and Joys Of Travel Writing: a Q&A
As I think I’ve mentioned before on this blog, college students researching journalism, travel literature, and Americans abroad interview me quite frequently. I rarely see the final result of these academic research projects, but I always find the interview process interesting — and hence I will share some of these interviews in coming weeks. I’ll…
Tips For Getting a Travel Book Published
A reader named Scott recently wrote me with the following question: How do you get published? I am working on a book proposal, but publishers don’t take unsolicited manuscripts or proposals and agents don’t seem to want unpublished writers. The book is nonfiction, about living and working in Russia for the last two years. I…
The Rolf Potts obscure collection: A look at three anthologies
Although the Books page of RolfPotts.com outlines my contributions to a number of literary travel anthologies in recent years, it doesn’t mention my appearance in three small-press fiction anthologies between 1999 and 2002. This is because, until recently, I never even knew these books existed. All of the stories in question were originally written when…
2006: The Year in Rolf
Before we get too far into 2007, I should probably try to sum up my 2006. It was really a nice year for me, in terms of travel and writing, as well as life in general. I visited a number of countries for the first time: Grenada in January, the Dominican Republic in May and…
The Last Antiwar Poem
Literary criticism: 50 years on, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” reads like a drug-addled, homoerotic variation of “Jackass.” If we aspire this year to recognize the anniversary of a Ginsberg poem that still seems relevant and challenging, we should fast-forward ten years to 1966, when the iconic Beat poet penned “Wichita Vortex Sutra.”
In the hall of the Baby Jesuses
Museums honor achievement, but finding original travel experiences amid their exhibits can sometimes be a challenge.