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Filmmaker Daniel Troia talks about his experience of biking across the USA with no food or money
Bicycling across the USA (with no money or food) looking for human connection
Of Travel, by Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education, in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country, before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. That young men travel under some tutor, or grave servant, I allow well; so that he be…
Bill Bryson: The 1998 Salon Wanderlust “Walk in the Woods” interview
Interview by Don George You are usually referred to as a “travel writer,” and your books are shelved in the “travel books” area of bookstores, but you are hardly a conventional travel writer. What does the term “travel writing” mean to you? Well, I suppose all it suggests really is leaving home, having to go…
How writers can sharpen their prose by understanding the “ladder of abstraction”
By Roy Peter Clark Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like “freedom” and “literacy.” Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy…
Wonder Year: The Art of Long-Term Family Travel and Worldschooling
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Insider tips for family vagabonding and worldschooling
“Marco Polo Didn’t Go There”: An introduction to Rolf’s second book
The title of this book is not my own creation: It is a direct quote from an inmate I met at Bangkok’s women’s prison in January of 1999. At the time I had been a full-time travel writer for less than a month, and I’d been telling people I planned to travel across Asia in…
“Perhapsing”: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction, by Lisa Knopp
At some point, writers of creative nonfiction come to a road block or dead end in our writing, where we don’t have access to the facts we need to tell our story or to sustain our reflection with depth and fullness. If only it was ethical to just make something up, we might think, or…
How Rolf Ruined the 1990s: A personal history of my grunge-bandwagon band
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Rolf reflects on the music of Elliott Smith, Nirvana, and his own Pacific NW grunge band, Swizzlefish
“The most beautiful thing in the world,” from Chloe Cooper Jones’s “Easy Beauty”
My father had an idea for a children’s book. He recited the idea to me many times when I was little. It was to be a story about beauty. It begins with a father saying good night to his daughter. The daughter is afraid to be alone and so she begs the father to stay…
Walk and Talk: Notes from a peripatetic salon across northern Thailand
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An ambulatory field report from a “Walk and Talk” moving salon across northern Thailand
In Praise of Loitering, by Ross Gay
I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands NO SOLICITING NO LOITERING stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in…