Kathleen Hughes writes for the Travel Report of the Wall Street Journal and has written first person stories about open water swimming in Turkey, the social dynamics of group tours, medical emergencies on planes, souvenirs and extreme travel. Her stories have also appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Vogue. She is a former staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where she was best known for Page One humor stories. She covered a long list of business beats, including commodities, paper companies, the collapse of the savings and loan industry, and Hollywood.
How did you get started traveling?
After my mother left my father, he took my brother and me on a trip through Europe. When my mother died two years later, he put on a backpack and announced he was going around the world. My brother and I, 14 and 16, started receiving postcards from Fiji, Tahiti, and New Zealand, where he was shearing sheep. It left me with the feeling that going around the world was a normal thing to do.
When I graduated from college I went to Paris and worked as an au pair — taking every opportunity to backpack around Europe myself. At one point, I lived in a cave in Greece with a French construction worker.
How did you get started writing?
I grew up in a family of female writers, and writing always seemed like the only way to go. My mother, Ann Hughes, wrote the early Open Court phonetics programs, and was always at her desk, typing. My grandmother and great-grandmother, Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs, wrote the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the personality type assessment, hoping it would lead to world peace. They were all in a mission to make the world a better place.
When I was about 12, I read Little Women and decided I would be a novelist. I got a stack of blank papers and a pen, and sat down on the cold terrazzo floor of our house in Miami. Nothing happened. I thought I would write a novel while living in Paris, but again, nothing happened.
When I moved to New York, I worked as a waitress and started freelancing. I wrote for Playboy, sold my first short story to Playgirl, and also wrote about performance art for the Soho Weekly News. After being fired from at least ten waitress jobs, I finally got a job as a news assistant in the New York bureau of the Wall Street Journal, answering the phone, carrying copy and sharpening pencils for the spot news editor.
I submitted freelance stories about performance art and the janitorial staff of the World Trade Center to the Journal and they made me a reporter, giving me the commodities beat. I was promoted to covering paper companies which became a mergers and acquisitions beat. The managing editor transferred me to Los Angeles to cover savings and loans– shortly before the entire industry collapsed.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
Being named a Wall Street Journal reporter was my first real break. I only wanted to write humor, but worked hard to cover whatever I was supposed to be covering. My first Page One story was about people who count oranges in Florida. The day it ran I was walking up a steep hill on a sunny day in San Francisco and I thought if I die now, it’s OK. It was the happiest I had ever been. I kept writing as many Page One humor stories as I could. Eventually I was dubbed “the a-hed queen”. (The a-hed was the middle column on Page One, named for the shape of the headline.)
One day, Glynn Mapes, the Page One editor at the time, asked if I wanted to be the roving a-hed writer, traveling around the world while being based in London. Just writing humor. My husband asked me to marry him at the same time, and I turned the Journal position down, raising two children in Palos Verdes, California while continuing to freelance.
It was the right decision, but I never stopped dreaming about a way to travel and write. My editors let me go on freelancing for Page One and The Second Front as a freelancer. When the Journal launched a Travel Report, I jumped at the chance to write travel stories.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
Taking notes by hand in a notebook. I can type as fast as anyone can talk but I can barely read my own handwriting. I hate the awkward nature of writing by hand as people talk. I love writing about what happens between people, how they feel, how they react to problems. I’m far less inclined to describe how the sun hits the sand in the desert. I just went to four countries, the Philippines, Brunei, Singapore and Malaysia, and didn’t take notes, which I now regret.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
I love interviewing people and laughing with them on the phone. That part of the research and writing process flows and comes fairly easily to me along with story ideas. I tend to overreport every story. Editing, cutting, the rational structure, fact checking over and over again, is the required work and a lot less fun.
On my grandmother’s personality assessment, the MBTI, I’m an ENFP, a common type for reporters. Understanding type theory helped me understand my own tendencies as a writer. My dominant process is extraverted intuition and that’s why I would rather interview people and laugh as opposed to attempting a sequel to Little Women.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
I overreport to get the best possible examples. Once, when sitting in the newsroom in the LA Bureau, I thought, I love this so much, I would do it for free. Freelance writing is not a major income stream.
I recently wrote a story for the Travel Report about extreme travel and the group of people who go to every country in the world. Their stories were fascinating, and I would love to join them. But that would obviously be expensive so I’m contemplating trying to get a book contract.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Well, I was a waitress but I kept getting fired. The manager of Windows on the World, once said to me, “Kathleen, you are a really nice girl but you are a terrible waitress.” Then she fired me for not delivering lemon rind with espressos. I would like to figure out a way to do a book.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
I’m writing this because I interviewed you, Rolf Potts, for my WSJ travel story on souvenirs. I was amazed at the amount of interesting history you wove into that subject in your book, Souvenir. It’s a truly masterful approach to what could have been a very banal subject.
I find a lot of routine travel writing — with a ton of place description — extremely boring. It’s helpful if you’re about to go somewhere. But if you’re not about to travel to the place being written about, there often isn’t enough there on a deeper, personal, emotional level for me to keep reading.
I read through all the interesting interviews on this site and took notes on the books everyone else liked.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
Find your own voice. Write things that people would be interested in hearing about at a dinner party. Write the way you speak.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
The biggest risk of normal travel is that you’re just on the outside looking in. If you’re writing a story, you have the perfect excuse to start asking everyone questions. You can truly engage.
Nothing makes me happier than having a story run in the Wall Street Journal with great art. The Journal has such incredible reach and I love the letters readers send with their own stories. I try to respond to every one of those letters quickly.
Also, travel writing is just funny. Travel is a parallel universe. There is so much humor and surprise in cultural differences. Travel is a unique education and a much better way to live.
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