Carey Baraka is a writer from Kisumu, Kenya. His writing about literary culture, food, travel, books, and politics, among other things, has appeared on TripSavvy, A Long House, Rest of World, Literary Hub, the Johannesburg Review of Books, Electric Literature, Serious Eats, Foreign Policy, and Gay Magazine, among other places. He is working on his first novel. He sings for a secret choir in Nairobi.
How did you get started traveling?
My mother is a high school teacher and sometimes her school would go on trips and what would happen is that whenever there was free space on the bus for one reason or the other, some teachers would ask to have their kids tag along on the school trips, and my brother and I were part of these kids sometimes, and those are my earliest, most precious traveling-just-because rather than traveling-to-get-somewhere memories.
How did you get started writing?
In school, we always wrote compositions, but it wasn’t until I was in high school — maybe fifteen or sixteen — that this crystallized into something more solid, where I started writing because I enjoyed the activity, and not just to meet some assignment. I wrote short fiction, I wrote poetry, and I wrote what I imagined would be my first book, an urban crime novel inspired by all the people I was reading at the time.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
I don’t think my writing career has worked like that, where I can point to a single event that changed everything, that catapulted me into it. And I think for most people, it’s years of work being published to relative silence, then a story somewhere gets read more, or an essay elsewhere gets shared by more people, and things get easier for you, but I think it’s more incremental than dependent on a big bang moment. With each essay/poem/story whatever, it’s one more door opened.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
Sometimes language is a problem, and you have to get someone to translate for you, which means that you get what the person says, but you often lose the nuances of what was said in the original language. Then, of course, if it’s a place you’ve never been to, and you have no local guides/informants and it isn’t easily Google-able, it becomes harder to plan for logistics like accommodation and transport.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
I’m always writing multiple things at the same time, which, coupled with the fact that I truly adore writing means that I’m not as strict as I should be about things like breaks and downtime from writing. Telling myself that I’m taking a break from working on something (maybe a break for the weekend or a holiday or whatever) means that I’ll have a thought that will work well on something else, or have an idea for a completely new piece of writing.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Travel isn’t cheap, and often the pay from the writing won’t make up for what you used while traveling, and of course there are passport politics which makes it harder for me to be a travel writer than people from countries whose passports rank higher on the totem pole of power.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Mostly no. I did a communications consultancy once, and hosted a TV show for a few months a few years ago, but apart from these it’s been fully-fully writing.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
Since I don’t like to partition writing/books into such strict categories (it’s all writing!), most of my influences are not people who would be considered travel writers. But I like Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul memoir, Wole Soyinka’s Ake memoir, while there are essays by writers like Elif Batuman, Hawa Jande Golakai and Hunter Thompson which I come to again and again in thinking about writing about place.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
I wish someone had told me how broke I’d be (ha-ha) trying to be a writer. But seriously, the usual disclaimers: hard work, talent, and luck.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
I love writing. The act of committing to page something that happens in real life is a wonderful feeling. Plus, I’ve met some tremendous people in all the places I’ve gone for my writing, had some delightful adventures while on the road.
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