Travel Writer: Ken Ilgunas

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kenilgunas.com spartanstudent@gmail.com
January 1, 2019

Ken Ilgunas is an author, journalist, and backcountry ranger. He has hitchhiked ten thousand miles across North America, paddled one thousand miles across Ontario in a birchbark canoe, and walked 1,700 miles across the Great Plains, following the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline. He’s written for the New York Times, Time, Backpacker, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. The author of travel memoirs Walden on Wheels and Trespassing Across America, and the advocacy book, This Land Is Our Land, he is from Wheatfield, New York and presently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

How did you get started traveling?

For about five years, starting around age sixteen, I developed this nagging fantasy to drive up to Alaska. Why I had this fantasy, I wasn’t sure, but the longer I left the fantasy untended, the more I came to be possessed by it. Eventually it became clear that I might experience some sort of breakdown if I continued to neglect it. So this journey up to Alaska took on a very real existential significance and I realized I needed to go for reasons I could neither comprehend nor articulate. (Ignoring a romantic longing can be like ignoring an infected cut on your finger: Leave it alone long enough and you risk corrupting the whole system.) I decided I’d pay for the drive by finding a summer job in Alaska. I found work cleaning rooms at Coldfoot, a truck stop north of the Arctic Circle. In the summer of 2005, a buddy and I drove up there, stopping at national parks along the way, eating an inadvisable amount of beef jerky, and having the all-around time of our lives. Looking back, the joy of travel, in this case, had less to do with the actual motion of travel than escaping the 9-to-5, suburban, consumer-capitalist world of which I’d been a clock-punching member from the beginning. My escape proved life-affirming and necessary.

How did you get started writing?

My family bought our first home computer when I was seventeen. We got AOL and I began to correspond over email with my best friend. I’d never written much of anything before, nor had I ever entertained the notion of being a writer, but I found something deeply therapeutic about writing emails about my life. These emails were long, frequent, disgustingly honest, immature, always introspective, always searching, and, in moments of discontent, darkly funny. I was unknowingly developing a first-person voice, which would make memoir writing a natural style later on.

What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?

In graduate school, when I was twenty-six, I wrote an essay for a travel writing class about my experiment of secretly living in my van at the Duke University campus. My professor thought it was good and urged me to publish it on Salon.com, where a former student of hers was an editor. A few weeks later, the story published and I had fifteen minutes of fame. This was well before #vanlife became a thing, so the story of a young person engaging in voluntary poverty was, for the public, novel. Soon after, a literary agent got in touch with me to inquire if I wanted to adapt the essay into a book. This was my first ever article for a national audience, so I was a bit shell-shocked and overwhelmed with everything that was happening: a positive response from readers, lots of media attention, and the possibility of a book deal. It was a huge and lucky break.

As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?

I have a poor memory for recalling conversations, so oftentimes I can’t accurately piece together a piece of dialogue I’d heard or engaged in. And if I’m traveling for leisurely purposes, I probably don’t have a recorder handy. If I do, I probably don’t want to mar the experience of the conversation by going through the trouble of documenting it.

I may very well determine to write an essay about an old journey, but often all I have to draw on are emails and notes in my journal. All those conversations — the bits of wisdom, the colorful dialects, the wit, the sad stories — are mostly forgotten, and my piece will be less rich because of it. So if I could have a super power as a travel writer, it would be the power of conversational recall, or at least the foresight and diligence to document the now for the future.

What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?

When I research, sometimes I wonder if I’m going to use any of the stuff I’m researching and if I’m just researching to procrastinate the much more taxing task of writing. The truth is, only a sliver of your research will make it into the final product, so you need to come to terms with the fact that a lot of your time will feel wasted.

What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?

Many travel books start as authentic journeys, on which the traveler embarks without the intention of writing a book. It’s only after the fact that these will-be authors decide to write about their journeys, and these travel books tend to be very good. And then the travel writer realizes she can continue to get paid for traveling and writing about her travels, so she begins to concoct new journeys. Stunts, even. At this point, she risks becoming an “established travel writer,” and I don’t mean that in a good way. This is when the writing begins to feel contrived. This is when travel writers begin to frantically pump out hardly readable books to pay the bills because they aren’t qualified to do any other sort of work. I fear heading down this road because we should be all be compelled to go on journeys, not because of money, but because something serious in our life compels us to go on them.

I think one way around this is to tell yourself that you can write any book you want to write and that you don’t need to be pigeonholed in any one genre. While I do indeed have an idea for another travel book, I’m playing with ideas for a how-to and another on climate change. Just this past year, I broke away from travel writing and wrote a history/advocacy book that calls for an American “right to roam.”

But to answer the question more accurately, the biggest challenge, of course, is just making the writing life pay so that I may live a semi-normal life.

Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?

I’d say I started professionally writing in 2012, when I got my first book deal and a couple of paid magazine gigs. Since then, writing has been my primary profession and source of income. I do, though, occasionally work for the National Park Service as a backcountry ranger. I’ve worked at the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Lake Clark National Park in Alaska. A few times a year, I’ll get invited by a university to come and talk about one of my books. My salary varies considerably by year, but with these supplemental sources of income, I can usually count on $30 to $35,000 a year, which is by no stretch of the imagination a lot, but it is enough for someone who loves his job and can get by with little.

What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?

What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?

Be ballsy in your adventures. Remember that you’re part of a long line of men and women who journeyed through the heart of Africa, to the poles of the Earth, and into the wilds of Alaska. These are the messengers who made it back and taught us something about what wonders and horrors exist outside the bubbles of our ordinary existences. Let’s go, too, to the places where others are too scared to go.

Be fearless with your prose. If there’s something you really want to write, but feel disinclined to write because it may be taboo, offensive, politically incorrect, embarrassing, or personally unflattering (but yet still feels right and true and important after reflection), you must write it. Whatever it is, you’ve probably come across one of those no man’s lands in the public discourse where we dare not step foot, and I’d argue that it’s your duty, above any other, to hop that fence and wade neck-high into this no man’s land. Office workers get carpal tunnel; coal miners get black lung; police sometimes get shot. We memoir writers have to say what others are unwilling to say, possibly embarrassing ourselves and alienating others. It’s our sacrifice.

Respect your audience’s patience. You’re up against TV, podcasts, Netflix, thousands of shows, millions of books, a galactic Internet of a trillion stimuli, snapchats, notifications, and Tinder matches. All of this is barraging the people with the feeblest attention spans in the history of humankind. Grab them by the first chapter, the first page, the first sentence!

Always be emailing/journaling/blogging. The future author in you will appreciate how most of the work was done long ago.

When you’re writing an important, quotable moment — a line, perhaps, for the ages — check the derivation of each of your words. Get the French out, and stick with old school Anglo-Saxon. French is for the academy; Anglo-Saxon goes straight to the soul.

Take long walks without a phone, music, podcasts, or earbuds. This is when I get most of my ideas and good thinking done.

What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?

When I’m in “travel writer” mode, I’m the best version of myself. I am extra curious. I am more open to the world. I am actively, not passively, engaged. I have a notepad in my hand and I’m noticing everything: the shape of clouds, the clang of machinery, the stray comment. In this heightened observational state, I feel like I’m finally taking in the world with all five senses.

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