Bruce Kirkby is an adventurer, writer and photographer. With journeys spanning more than eighty countries and thirty years, Kirkby’s accomplishments include the first modern crossing of Arabia’s Empty Quarter by camel, a descent of Ethiopia’s Blue Nile Gorge by raft, a sea kayak traverse of Borneo’s northern coast and a coast-to-coast Icelandic trek. A columnist for The Globe and Mail, author of three bestselling books and winner of multiple National Magazine Awards, Kirkby’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Outside magazine and Canadian Geographic. He makes his home in Kimberley, British Columbia.
How did you get started traveling?
During university, two close friends took a semester off, flew to Patagonia, and biked all over the place. The snapshots and stories they returned with — of penguins and pampas and all-night asadas — bridged a gap, and for the first time brought the fantastical adventures I’d lapped up as a boy (Bonington, Thesiger, Stanley & Livingston) into the realm of possibility.
A year later, upon graduation, I planned my own bike journey on Pakistan’s newly minted Karakorum Highway. A month before departure, my travel partner announced he’d fallen in love, and wasn’t coming. So I flew to Islamabad alone, and the six months that followed — as I meandered by bicycle through Pakistan, India, Nepal, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand — set my life in a new direction.
How did you get started writing?
I will preface this by sharing the fact I failed two courses at high school — English and Typing! I tended to excel in Maths and Science instead. So absolutely nothing in my youth augured a career in words. But from the earliest days, I enjoyed reading, and held books in the highest regard.
At age 31, upon returning from a camel journey across Arabia’s Rub Al Kahli (The Empty Quarter), I decided I wanted to write about the experience. I’d been inspired by the landscape, but more significantly, by the people. I’d learned to speak pidgin Arabic during the 70 days in the desert, and glimpsed the extraordinary moral code the Bedu lived by. In a time of growing Islamophobia, I wanted to share a different vision of the Arab world, and so sat down in front of my laptop. Twelve days later I had 100,000 words and the start of my first book.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
I dropped the first five pages of that early manuscript in the mailbox of a neighbor, who happened to be a journalist. He read it on a flight to New York, and faxed back a copy covered in chicken scratch. His comments included:
1) Don’t worry about the extensive markup; this is a normal edit.
2) You need to choose between past- or present-tense; you can’t flip back and forth.
3) Don’t go with your first offer. Get an agent. This is really good.
In the months ahead I found an agent, landed a major publisher, and my life moved in a new direction, due almost entirely to this relative stranger’s early confidence in my work.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
I suspect this is common for all writers, but finding the balance between taking full and copious notes while simultaneously allowing myself to be fully and authentically engaged in the passing moments, swept along by serendipity. Furthering the challenge for me personally is the fact I like to take a lot of photographs, and very often illustrate the articles or story’s I publish, so I must navigate the additional challenge of keeping both my writing and photographic mind engaged at once, while remaining a participant in the moments, and not just an observer.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
I find the Internet has increasingly blurred the line between research and writing. Many years ago, I read everything I could get my hands on, make endless notes, and eventually sat down to distill everything I had learned. Today, it is easy to incessantly ‘Google just one more thing’, which not only takes me away from thoughts and writing, but on a deeper level, feels like it fractures or weakens the process. My work, if I am not careful, can slip towards a series of tawdry info-tidbits dug up in the moment, and not woven together by deeper understanding.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Eating?!
Sorry, it’s the same for many writers of course, because writing is very often a thankless profession monetarily. I’m lucky because I do other things to help make ends meet, which frees me up to pursue the stories and landscapes that interest me.
The wages paid for words are abysmal, and competition is fierce, meaning one common danger modern artists face—I see this both in writing and photography—is accepting work that is of no interest, simple because of the unrelenting need to pay bills. Over time, this tends to steer them away from deeper passions and curiosities. An example I’ll use is wedding photography. Sure, some people love this work, and excel at it. More power to them. But boy, I know a number of incredibly talented travel photographers who spend every weekend from May until September holding their noses and shooting weddings. Yeah, they make a decent living. But creatively they are dying. And that balance, between making enough to get by, while remaining true to one’s artistic vision is among the greatest challenges a modern travel writer faces.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Oh yes! And it has been my greatest gift. Years ago, without even trying, I began giving speeches at corporate conferences. Many ‘purists’ may turn up their noses at this, but I honestly enjoy being on stage, and find the artistry of performing while engaging an audience, to be rewarding.
More importantly, public speaking has given me extraordinary freedom. Because I continue to live cheaply (vagabonding at home and away), what I make as a speaker pays for everything. Which leaves me open to pursue travel stories and ideas that matter to me. I feel very, very lucky in this.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
I read incessantly, and beyond the obvious travel classics, a few books that have had an outsized influence on me include Arabian Sands (Wilfred Thesiger), Caught Inside (Daniel Duane), Rowing to Latitude (Jill Fredson), The Golden Spruce (John Valliant), Arctic Dreams (Barry Lopez) and Breath (Tim Winton).
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
I might suggest reading Stephen King’s On Writing as a starting point, for it does a good job of crystalizing what a life of words entails. In a nutshell, you better really love both reading and writing. Sounds obvious I know, but the popular (romanticized) vision of a writing life rarely matches reality. This is not to say a life of words is not a wonderful, wonderful thing. But I think it is best to embark on the journey with a somewhat clear idea of what lies ahead.
And one more thing: please don’t measure yourself, or your successes, against anyone else. It is very easy, in this hyper-connected world, to see what others have accomplished, and feel ‘lesser than’ if we don’t find the same results. Writing and travel are not about awards, but rather the journey (ouch, yes, a tired metaphor), meaning the more we can focus on our own passages, the greater the intrinsic payoff.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
There are many, but two consistently stand out.
First, during the travel experience itself, I constantly push myself to watch more closely, to engage endlessly with locals (even when exhausted), and to think more deeply about everything I’m seeing and experiencing. Instead of being swept along, at times mindlessly as can be the case while backpacking, I feel as if I wring every last drop out of my travels.
Secondly, when I come home, I don’t relegate the journey to memory. Rather, I relive it over and over, seeking threads that bind the disparate experiences into deeper meaning. And in that process, I come to understand both my journeys, and myself, far better than I would without writing.
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