Henry Wismayer is a writer of non-fiction essays, commentary and features, with a particular focus on travel. His work has appeared in over 80 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post. He lives in South London with his partner and two children,
How did you get started traveling?
My first experience of independent travel owed more to the cultural determinism of its time than any youthful volition on my part. I was just lucky to leave school at a time when the concept of the pre-university gap year was very much in vogue. A couple of friends had planned a boilerplate trip through Australia and South-East Asia, and I latched on. I won’t pretend it was anything other than a callow, dissolute, and rudderless adventure. We barely scratched the surface of the places we visited, and each evening ended in Bacchanalia. But I still came home with my conception of what the world had to offer irreversibly broadened. I went to university semi-reluctantly, convinced that a far more exciting education awaited me overseas.
How did you get started writing?
After university, I bummed around a bit, taking shitty temping jobs to fund periods of backpacking. When I finally got my act together, I flirted with a career in traditional journalism, but quickly realized I possessed neither the hunger for the day’s story nor the work ethic to serve the underpaid, homebound apprenticeship that to make it in news. Travel writing presented itself as a potentially rewarding alternative, and a way of investing my already inveterate traveling with a veneer of purpose. So I conceived a scheme to climb Jebel Toubkal, Morocco’s highest mountain, in just 24 hours. That story – hopelessly amateurish as it was – ended up as a cover story for an inflight magazine. And I thought: damn, maybe I could do more of this.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
I’m not sure I could identify one breakthrough moment. My career progression was incremental, its trajectory a testament to bloody-minded perseverance and self-belief in the face of the rejection every travel journalist must endure. Writing for a couple of inflight magazines gave me the confidence and portfolio to approach the consumer magazines. From there I climbed the ladder to the UK nationals, then onto the big American papers and magazines. I remain to be convinced that there is any other to do it. You could be the most gifted travel writer of your generation, but the diminishing pool of outlets, and the editors’ understandable inclination to look after their established contributors, means that breaking the big, better-paying titles will always be a battle of attrition.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
It’s hard to answer this, because in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, and the strictures that has placed on travel, I am feeling so nostalgic about my past freedom that every moment I’ve spent on the road seems, in hindsight, to have been the most exquisite privilege. In truth, I’ve always found the notion of “travel-writer,” at least as a job title, to be faintly absurd. Getting paid to travel, while simultaneously being incentivized to learn as much as possible in the process? If you find yourself in a position to even countenance doing that for a living, you should know that you are the beneficiary of some extraordinary good fortune. I’ve had some interesting dalliances with tropical diseases, so if pressed I would have to say that my bête noir has been staying healthy. But in general my stance is that such vicissitudes are the price of admission. Besides, misadventure tends to make the best stories!
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Any freelance writer will tell you that pitching is the bane of existence. All those emails fired into the ether, never knowing whether they are being read, let alone considered, is an unavoidable source of frustration for all writers. Of the writing process itself, my biggest foible is a tendency to over-research, which in turn makes it harder to identify a strong narrative angle. In the early days, I would find myself stopping every few meters to scribble down another thought or observation. And I would come home with two full notebooks, wondering how on earth I am ever going to whittle it all down to 2,000 words. I have got better at editorializing while on the road. But I still struggle to know what stuff to discard, and to cohere my own experience, which all feels valuable to me in the moment, into a narrative that time-pressed consumers might want to read.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
I don’t think I’m betraying any great trade secret in admitting that the economics of travel journalism, which were always precarious, no longer add up. This is especially true since coronavirus, which has devastated the industry on which we report, and torpedoed what paltry share of the advertising market the old media had managed to hold back from the clutches of the internet giants. I lost six feature commissions within two weeks of the lockdown in America. At the time of writing, very few of my regular outlets are assigning new stories to non-staffers. But the truth, as any honest travel journalist will tell you, is that the industry has been on its uppers for some time. As such, I have long ago learned to be fatalistic. The pandemic has merely accelerated our confrontation with a reckoning for travel writing, and for the whole notion of modern tourism, that is urgent and necessary. Climate change and over-tourism demand a paradigm shift in the way that we undertake and think about foreign travel. We have to hope that something better springs from the ashes, and that good travel writers will be there to celebrate that renaissance.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Although travel remains my principal arena of journalism, I’ve been diversifying my writing repertoire for some years. I do bits of social commentary, and contribute to the internet’s cacophony of opinion. In masochistic moments I’ve even dipped my toe into the fetid pond of British politics. I also have a rather more resilient side-gig at home in south London, where I work as a landscape gardener. In many ways it’s an ideal set-up. I work for a good friend who allows me almost criminal flexibility, and accommodates my need to go away on assignment, often at very short notice. There is much to recommend any activity that offers respite from the blinking cursor on your computer screen. I’ve found that the days spent tending flower-beds and erecting fences are an indispensable antidote to writer’s block, and a palliative for the fits of despondency and diffidence that accompany a writing life.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
Theroux for the observations of a curious and irascible traveller after my own heart; Robert Macfarlane for the kind of effortless eloquence that makes you reread whole paragraphs; Ryszard Kapuscinski for a sense of how it felt to be everywhere when the world felt huge. Among lesser known writers, I have recently discovered William Atkins, whose work displays a formidable blend of artistry and learning. And I loved the reflective tone of Kate Harris’ Lands of Lost Borders. A quick plug, too, for my good friend Stephen Fabes’ forthcoming book Signs of Life, based on his six-year bike ride around the world. He’s a gifted writer, and a witty anecdotalist, so this should be one to watch.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
Given the hugely volatile state of the travel journalism market, and tourism more generally, I would be very hesitant about encouraging aspiring writers to think that there was a living to be derived from travel writing at this moment. Obviously, the discipline is in a state of flux. The bucket-list age of listicles and travel as a form of experiential acquisition may be dead, and that is not an entirely bad thing. But as for what may supplant it, your guess is as good as mine. I would counsel aspiring writers to use this hiatus to hone your voice, to conjure new forms and story angles that might better fit the moment. Be professional in this, but don’t focus on making money or you may end up on the side of Satan as an Instagram influencer. Treat it as a passion, a craft, and a potential source of edification and joy. Understand that the internet, and the increasingly frenzied tenor of global politics, means that readers today have limited bandwidth to read conventional travel reportage. Think about ways that journeying might interrogate or intersect with the zeitgeist – the changing climate; the dusk of peak globalization – because this is where the future of travel writing lies in the short-term.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
I often find myself viewing travel, particularly compulsive travel, as a surrogate for declining spirituality. Its obsessive practitioners are in many ways temporal pilgrims, seekers on a quest for insignificance. That quest requires more effort in 2020 that did back when I started traveling in earnest. The democratization of travel and information has shrunk the world, and the notion of easy enchantment has evaporated in the process. But it’s still rare that I will go away without experiencing some moment – whether in the beauty of a landscape or the goodness of the people who inhabit it – that is unexpected and new. For those inclined to cynicism, as I am, there is great reassurance in that.
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