Born in Scotland and educated at Oxford University, George Black has been based in the U.S. since 1982. He is the author of seven nonfiction books, including On the Ganges: Encounters with Saints and Sinners on India’s Mythic River, which debuts this month. His long-form journalism has appeared in venues such as the New Yorker, the Nation, Mother Jones, Harper’s, and Outside, and he has worked as a consultant for environmental and human rights organizations. He is currently developing ideas for a book on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the long-term legacy of the American War in Vietnam. He is married to the writer Anne Nelson, and they have two kids in their 20s—one living in Berlin and one in Los Angeles, and both passionate travelers.
How did you get started traveling?
Technically I’d have to say it was when I was 17 and started hitch-hiking around Europe, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends. Since then, I always seem to have had a map in my hand. But in terms of travel defining what I wanted to do with my life, it was in my mid-20s—breaking away from a job I hated and taking off on a three-month trip around South America. The first truly memorable experience was a hallucinatory journey from Venezuela to Bolivia through the interior of Brazil, when the first portion of the north-south highway was being cut across the Amazon Basin. It was basically just an endless strip of red mud, and about 100 miles short of the Bolivian border the vehicle I was riding in was confiscated by the Brazilian military. Long story, and an early taste of many more adventures to come.
How did you get started writing?
That started even earlier. The bug probably bit when I was ten years old, when I won an essay prize, then wrote a monumental book-length project about my passion for stamp-collecting! I wrote and published a lot of poetry when I was in my late teens and early 20s, but once I started traveling I started on the serious stuff, initially by freelance reporting in Central America during the wars of the early 1980s.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
That’s a hard question, because I don’t think there was any single “break.” I guess if I had to name one thing it was when I published my first book, The Good Neighbor: How the United States Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean (Pantheon, 1988).
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
I think the challenges evolve as you get older. When I started out, the biggest challenge was probably just learning where to draw the line between being adventurous and being reckless and stupid, which got me into a couple of life-threatening situations. I still get the same kick out of being in remote and difficult places, but the challenges these days are more about honing my craft as a reporter: knowing how to really listen to people I interview, how to convey their voice accurately and respectfully, and how to get them to talk openly in the first place. The wisest piece of advice I ever got was from a great investigative reporter who specialized in getting Central American torturers and death-squad leaders to talk about the terrible things they had done. Learn how to remain silent; eventually the person you’re interviewing will almost always fill the silence. It’s an innate human impulse. That advice has served me pretty well.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Over-researching, without a doubt. If I have to write a 4,000-word story, I’ll invariably end up with enough notes to write a book. Google in that sense has been both a wonderful gift and a terrible curse.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Juggling multiple income streams and a complicated work flow, without sacrificing the kind of satisfaction you only get from the most creative projects—which of course tend to be the most poorly paid. Very few people make a living these days entirely from what the publishers call “quality mid-list non-fiction”—which is essentially what I write—and even fewer people make it solely through magazine journalism. There are so many fewer outlets these days, and even when you get a good assignment the rates are lower than they were ten or 15 years ago. And you’re constantly at the mercy of other people’s schedules. It’s very stressful.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
All the time! To feed the creative beast, I rely a lot on more lucrative consultancy gigs, and that’s true of most of the writers I know. Sometimes they end up writing deadly corporate advertising copy to pay the rent. I’ve been lucky enough to avoid that. My clients are all not-for-profits that are involved in issues I care about.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
A lot of people have questioned whether my favorite “travel” book is even really a travel book at all—Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia. I love its narrative form—a journey from A to B, told in episodic fragments. On the Ganges definitely reflects its influence. I like pretty much everything Ryszard Kapuściński wrote, especially Travels with Herodotus, which I quote from at the beginning of On the Ganges. Lawrence Osborne started off as a travel writer, and though he’s evolved into a novelist, his books still convey a wonderfully vivid sense of place, and his characters are usually foreigners blundering around in “exotic” cultures they don’t really understand—which is how I feel about myself a lot of the time!
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
Well, let’s start by assuming you mean real travel writing, and not the “15 Places to Get a Great Cappuccino in Luang Prabang” stuff that passes for travel writing these days. It depends where you’re going. I can only speak from my own experience, which tends to be in parts of the developing world that are more remote or politically conflictive. I think you have to be constantly alert to the danger of forcing what you see and experience into a narrative that reflects your existing preconceptions or prejudices—we’re all prey to what we now call confirmation bias. Avoid exoticism for its own sake, and at all costs avoid poverty porn.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
There are so many. It can be experiencing the vast silence of the remote Peruvian Andes. It can be the discovery of a truly great new city like Hanoi. Every trip is different. But I think above all it’s the chance encounters with people you meet along the way. Those encounters really form the backbone of the story of my travels in India.
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