Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is the author of Island People: The Caribbean and The World and the co-editor, with Rebecca Solnit, of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and his essays and journalism have also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, Artforum, and The Nation. He earned a PhD in geography at UC-Berkeley and is currently a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, where he also teaches. He lives in New York.
How did you get started traveling?
I suppose I started traveling, like many people, in the backseat of my parents’ car. Every summer, when I was younger, we drove from Vermont to the Maritimes—to Prince Edward Island, where my grandparents lived. We didn’t really travel further afield than that—my folks didn’t have the money to bring us to Europe or the Caribbean—but I think even going to Canada every year, being aware from a young age that there were other countries out there, places that were not the United States, places that were different, was important. Of course Canada and the U.S. aren’t that different—but I think I was turned on, from the start, by thinking through how they were different: with trying to parse subtle distinctions in culture and customs and communication, trying to understand why those differences were there. My favorite book as a kid, without a doubt, was a big old Rand McNally Atlas of the World. I could stare at its maps for hours; just looking at place-names, topographies, pointing to a spot at random, like the narrator Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and thinking: I want to go there.
It wasn’t until my late teens, really, that I traveled much beyond that corner of North America where I grew up, but the first trip I did on my own—I went to London as part of a study-abroad program with a bunch of other kids, but then I went, on my own, to Ireland for a week. That was really transformative. Ireland had been kind of an obsession for me in my teens, a place I’d really wanted to go—plainly I’ve always had a thing for islands (maybe especially for islands whose histories are full of awful stuff like colonialism and mono-crop agriculture, but whose sensibility is lyrical). Ireland, of course, was great. But traveling on my own, thousands of miles from home—that was what mattered. Especially since I managed to leave my backpack on the ferry over from England. Which is to say I was in a foreign place, far from home, where I actually did have to depend on the kindness of strangers, and make my way—well, to learn that I could do so, that people are people wherever you go, that a kind of hospitality ethic pervades cultures everywhere, that was powerful. (Thankfully I was reunited with my backpack, after a few days, but the time in the interim, for my 18-year old self anyway, was a thrill!)
How did you get started writing?
I was always writing. My mom was a high school English teacher. Words and books were just a part of our household. I was a big reader as a kid, but I don’t think I ever thought I’d write books myself. I was more into music and art; and sports—if at 15 you asked me my main goal, I would have said to play professional soccer. In high school, I dabbled at music; I was really into visual art—drawing, painting. But in college, which I suppose is that age when we learn—hopefully—to really drill into one passion in particular, to try and excel at that one thing, that changed. I was off the soccer team by the end of sophomore year. I stopped with the art. I gave up playing piano. Writing just became what I did—it became my thing.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
I don’t think I can point to one particular “break” as having shaped my vocation, or career. I think it was more about having the good fortune, in school and after, to meet a couple of writers who I deeply admired, and whose encouragement and belief really helped give me know that I could do what they did, too. Finding a mentor, or mentors—it’s so key, in whatever field you’re in.
But I don’t think, in general, that you can or should approach writing in an overly careerist way. Of course it’s marvelous to reach the stage, if you do, of getting paid for words you’ve composed. But no one should get into writing to get rich—or even with the idea, these days, that it’s a wise way to try and pay your bills! (There’s a reason that most of us actually earn our livings teaching or doing other things.) The reason to get into writing, and to pursue is as a craft, is because you can’t not. Because you love literature, and books. Because you’re turned on by the challenge of getting better every day, and with every piece you do. For me, sitting down to write is how I figure out what I think about—it’s like breathing, really. Something I do every day. And I think that that practice, that unglamorous but totally nourishing solitary practice, is the basis for all. Without that, all the other stuff—the book contracts and magazine assignments, and whatever else—is impossible.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
Well, I’m always keen to build portraits of places that are built not merely around my own impressions, but around encounters with people, and around the ways in which people narrate the places they’re from—there’s a reason my book is called Island People: it’s a portrait of the Caribbean that’s built, above all, around people. So when I’m working, or trying to forge a vivid picture of a place, it’s all about finding the people, the exemplary characters, who can help create that picture—and that’s not always, or even very often, the prominent or famous people in that place. It’s much more usually the case that it’s the proverbial man on the corner, playing dominoes or drinking rum; or the woman caring for her kids, or playing dominoes, too.
I sometimes think that the part of the world where I’ve most often worked—the Caribbean—is extra suited to this approach, simply because the weather’s warm and people live a lot of their lives in public. Extroversion, especially on the larger islands—Cuba, Jamaica—is a kind of cultural norm. All of which makes the reporter’s job, in those places, easier: people like to talk. I’m sure trying to write Island People in say, Siberia, or even Sweden, would have presented different challenges. But you know, one thing you do learn, when a big part of your job is talking with people, is that human beings—whether they live in the tropics or on a tundra somewhere—do love talking about themselves, if you give them the chance. And they love talking about where they’re from, too—whether they love their home-place, or are dying to leave.
So you find a way.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Perhaps the biggest challenge lies in the transition between the two—from research, that is, to writing. By which I mean you can always, of course, do more research. And if you have a background in academia, as I do, there’s probably always a voice asking if you’ve done all the reading you should have; if there’s some crucial article or monograph that you missed, that experts in the field or on the city or country you’re writing about will point to, and say: “see, clearly he didn’t do his homework!” But the truth, too, is that at a certain point nothing beats research for procrastination. At a certain point, you’ve got to say enough is enough and just face that blank page and start to write—to have faith that, even if you don’t know everything about whatever you’re addressing, you at least know enough to connect the dots, and tell the story, in hopefully fresh or revealing ways.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
You mean beyond paying the bills? That’s the challenge, always, for a writer! For me, while I was working on Island People, there was also the challenge of just affording the research—I mean the Caribbean has a lot of islands, and the book aimed to cover them all. My agent got me a decent advance for the book, but the thing about a big project like that is that the advance disappears after a year or whatever, but you’ve still got another couple of years to go to finish the thing—or in my case, a dozen more islands to visit. So you really do have to be resourceful, and hustle. Part of that, in my case, was scaring up magazine assignments to do stories on the places I wanted to go to for the book. Part of it was a healthy amount of begging and borrowing, certainly, if not stealing. Fellowships and grants, too, are key. I had a Fulbright to Trinidad, near the end of writing Island People—that was essential. And it wasn’t a project that I could really say, “well, I didn’t get to Puerto Rico – let’s just leave it out.” It’s a kind of “travel book,” yes, but it’s hung on a kind of big argument about history—it’s hung on this argument that the Caribbean, and all of its islands, belongs at the center of any story we tell about the making of the modern world, and modern world culture.
So, really, I had have the goods to back that up. Once I was in it, there was no way out.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Of course. I’ve done all kinds of things—restaurant work; farm-work; house-moving; house-painting; carpentry; working with kids and coaching soccer; copywriting for fancy marketing firms; working as a research assistant; working as a personal assistant; teaching writing; teaching history. These days, I work pretty full-time as a writer, but I teach at NYU—both undergrads and graduate students. Which I really enjoy. I feel very lucky to get to teach, but the truth is I’ve loved aspects of most every job I’ve done. I don’t resent any of them. They feed the writing. I think it’s your job as a writer to be deeply curious about all the varied ways that people can spend their days, and make meaning in their lives. Trying to write about people in different walks of life, trying to understand their stories—it would be pretty difficult if you’ve never done anything yourself but sit around trying to craft good sentences.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
Wow, there’s so many. Though my friend Robert Macfarlane—who’s certainly high on that list—likes to talk about how we’d do well, these days, to replace the term “travel writing” with “place writing.” I agree with him. Travel writing, as a genre, has a lot of baggage—it was, for a very long time an overtly imperial style of literature. It was the label attached to books by adventurous fellows (and they were largely fellows) who set out from England or France, during those centuries when European powers colonized the globe, to describe the “exotic” lives and home-places of the colonized. As kind of predicate for literature, there’s obviously all kinds of things wrong with that. That said, there are of course many writers in that tradition—or who grew from it, better put, in the twentieth—who are hugely important to me. Patrick Leigh Fermor. Jan Morris. V.S. Naipaul—who for all his odious views is, of course, essential. But I do think, as I say, that thinking in terms of place writing, these days, is where it’s at—not least because doing so doesn’t come freighted, as travel writing often still is, with some idea of the “exotic”: with a conception of difference as titillating, or less-than, or deviant from some presumed norm.
Place writing, as I like to think of it, is just literature that’s highly attuned to the power of place, and to how our experience and understanding of place shapes our lives. I’m also especially into books that are about places as ideas, as much as spots on the map—books that are about juxtaposing the accumulated lore and literature that have attached themselves to a certain geography, with the writer’s experience of that geography. Ian Frazier’s Great Plains is a great example of that. So is, more recently, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s Harlem is Nowhere. In terms of just straight-up great books about particular places, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, about Mumbai, is a touchstone for me. So is Robert Hughes’ Barcelona, and most anything by Alma Guillermoprieto. There’s a whole mini-genre, by now, of books about walking that I cherish—Rob Macfarlane’s The Old Ways; my dear friend and collaborator Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust. A third writer who belongs in that bracket, based on his essays alone, is Garnette Cadogan—when he finally gets his book out, you’ll see why.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
Well, I can’t deny that two of my great passions are literature and travel. So I feel very fortunate, really, that I’ve been able to combine those two vocations into a career—or a central part of my life, at least. But I think the reasons I read—and write—and the reason I’m so energized by exploring a new place, is at bottom the same. I think all of us, whatever we do for work and wherever we live, want at some level to connect. We want to grow our own world and deepen our understanding of this planet. We want to better grasp not merely what makes us different, as people, but what’s common to people everywhere. Reading lets us do that. So does travel. It’s through those activities, apart and together, that I’ve encountered the art I most cherish; that I’ve met the people I most admire; that I’ve been able to explore the ideas I care about and share the stories, as a writer, that move me. And I wouldn’t trade any of that, at this point, for anything—it’s just what I do, and will do, I think, in some form or another, from here on out. It’s just life.
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