Troy Nahumko left Canada at an early age, first as a traveling musician around the United States and Europe, then as a writer and teacher in countries as diverse as Yemen, Azerbaijan, Libya and Laos. He has published travel pieces in newspapers and magazines around the world and was awarded the Mercedes Calles y Carlos Ballestero Prize for an article about Spain. His most recent work includes his bi-weekly opinion column in the Spanish daily HOY, the Mid-Spain section of the recent Lonely Planet Experience Spain guide and he has just published his first book, Stories Left in Stone: Trails and Traces in Cáceres, Spain.
How did you get started traveling?
I happened to be born in the last city of any real size in a place where the fabled Alaskan highway begins, and the true great north opens up and skids across the tundra and ice all the way to the North Pole. It is vast, beautiful and vertiginously empty, and as a young man I simply wanted to be anywhere else. I’m also a musician and started playing professionally quite young. So when I had just finished high school, a Zydeco band from Louisiana came through town. Their guitar player had been pinched at the border with weed, and they were guitarless and needed someone to fill in. The thing is, what they were paying was beyond miserable, and none of the established musicians around town would even think twice about taking the gig, and that was my chance.
I jumped in the van and headed south with them and never came back. With them I saw almost a third of the states in the US and this served to feed my wanderlust even more. I had had a taste and couldn’t get enough. I left that band, joined another, and another, and just kept going. I remember playing Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville down in the Florida Keys one Christmas early on, swimming in the Caribbean with the bougainvillea in bloom, and I called my mom in the frozen north to let her know that I was never coming back. And I never did.
How did you get started writing?
While touring, we were on the road around ten months of the year, all over North America and Europe. Touring sounds romantic, but what you end up with is having a lot of time on your hands. I had always been a voracious reader, and this led me to start keeping journals and writing old-fashioned letters with pen and paper to friends and family, to help keep track of my travels and adventures. These developed over the years, and I started editing and revising them, trying to get better by emulating the writers I was reading at the time. I then got off the road and started to travel under a different guise, as a teacher. The road was wonderful, but while you travel a lot, you don’t often see much. More often than not you just see a hotel or a venue and then pack up and get back in the van.
So I stopped touring and found myself teaching in Madrid. I quickly found that through teaching I could get to places that my guitar hadn’t taken me. My writing became less transitory and more in-depth. I guess I really first started to write travel pieces while living in Sana’a, Yemen. This was during the second Gulf war, and there were very few other writers around and this dearth of competition helped me get my foot into some doors as an unknown writer with no resume.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
One of my first ‘big’ pieces that I managed to land was an article about the city where, somewhat ironically, I now live. It was with one of Canada’s biggest newspapers, the Toronto Star. That piece was really well received and it later got republished in the Irish Times. All of that led to me being awarded a very prestigious prize here in Spain, the Mercedes Calles y Carlos Ballestero prize for journalism, even though I wasn’t a journalist and have never considered myself as such. With that, I was then offered an op-ed column in a newspaper here in Spain, and that has helped me diversify my writing.
As a travel writer, writing (in Spanish) for a Spanish reader is a completely different way to approach writing for me. As a travel writer, you are usually an outsider writing about a place for people who, in theory, know little or nothing about the place. But with my column I find myself being the outsider writing for people who actually live here. This shift in perspective has helped me grow as a writer and learn to look at things from completely different angles.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
I think that the biggest challenge for me and perhaps all travel writers and story gatherers is the language gap. If you don’t speak the language of the place that you are traveling in, you are always at a disadvantage. You are either forced to limit your contacts with English speakers (which sets a filter, socially and economically) or you have to rely on someone else to help you gather your stories. This immediately puts another filter between you and the story. Your translator might be the most professional in the world, but their ideas and perspective are always going to color what they relate to you. Then there is the fact that, with a translator, the process is always going to seem formalized, like an interview, and people don’t always open up when they find themselves in a position like this. Some of the best stories arise at the bar, the teahouse or buying bread in the market, but if you don’t have the language to do this yourself, those stories, and especially the nuances in them, get lost in non-translation.
Take one of my favorite travel writers, Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Why are his books so incredibly deep? It’s because of the language. He is an extremely fluent Arabic speaker and thus can penetrate the culture to an extent that others can only dream of. This is clearly demonstrated in the trilogy that he wrote on Ibn Battuta’s travels. The parts where he is in the Arabic speaking word are just so much more developed and rounded than the later bits and that’s because he was enveloped in a language (and culture) he understood. Once the books move beyond that sphere, while still excellent, they lose some of that penetrating insight.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
When it comes to research, once again I’d have to say the language. It’s amazing what is available out there in English, but it still only scratches the surface of many places. Once again you are getting all of your information through the lens of someone who speaks English or a translation. Without the local language(s) you are excluded from reading the local newspapers (goldmines for under the radar things that actually interest the locals and not what they think foreigners might be interested in) and books that haven’t been and never will be translated. Even here in Spain, which is an extremely (over)touristed country with a long-standing and vibrant literary culture, the vast majority of local writers go unknown outside of the Spanish reading world.
If that’s the case for such a well-established place like Spain, imagine somewhere like Georgia, Ethiopia or Tuavulu. And if you’re not able to read what everyone else is reading, you’re missing out on a huge aspect of the culture. One example of this that comes to mind of this is Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino. I first read the book while living in Baku, Azerbaijan and it was a wonderfully incisive window into the region’s past that echoed into the present. But it was only translated by chance and really only popularized beyond the region thanks to Paul Theroux coming across it and getting it out to the world beyond.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
I suppose my biggest challenge is that I have always shied away from taking on some of the less fulfilling work available to travel writers. I’m just not interested in writing listicles or go-here-do-this-take-a-picture-here kind of pieces. That (huge) side of travel writing world seems completely foreign to me. I don’t travel that way, so how am I supposed to write that way?
What I am interested in are people and their stories and if the work entails writing something without a narrative, I’m just not that interested in it. I’ve never played in cover bands and have never pushed to get into this market of writing. This attitude has obviously limited me from getting work and finding new opportunities. But writing for me (like music) has to be about doing something I love, something that makes me feel something. Otherwise, it would convert an art that I love into something I hate just to get by. Famous last words I’m sure, because if the wolf (or landlord) is at the door one day, I’m sure I’ll be happy to tell the world about the five cleanest public bathrooms in Barcelona.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
I’ve always done other work to make ends meet. Writing has never made my ends meet and in fact I don’t think it ever even ‘started’ let alone ‘end’ anywhere. As I mentioned before, I’ve always been a musician and for many years that was my main activity. I’ve since transitioned into teaching English, and that has been my main bread-and-butter for more than 20 years now. Teaching has provided me with not only the opportunity to spend extended periods of time in places that I would otherwise only pass through, but also has opened up societies and cultures to me. True, once again, I have had access to that part of society that spoke or was interested in English, but it still provides a much deeper link than just interacting with taxi drivers, waiters and hotel clerks. But even if writing doesn’t do much for my wallet or my kids’ inheritance, I still write each and every day. For me it has become an exercise through which I interpret the world, whether I publish what I have written or not.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
The one travel book that is never far from reach and that I continually dip into now and then is Ibn Battuta’s travels. To me it is perhaps one of the most fascinating books ever written…even if half of it is Kapuscinski-style colored memories or flat out invented, it’s perhaps the greatest portrait of a world we will never know. Herodotus is perhaps second in that sense and then Cabeza de Vaca’s account of crossing North America. I enjoy not only the travel detailed in these classics, but also the time-travel they provide. But after all is said and done, I am a die-hard Battutaphile.
As for ‘modern’ writers, I am always looking for what Lawrence Durrell termed ‘spirit of place’. His writing blew me away as a young man and made me crave the Mediterranean. Everything he wrote seemed to be the antithesis of the great Canadian prairies. I suppose the irony of that is that I still have yet to visit Alexandria. But he’s an example that it hasn’t always been pure ‘travel writers’ that have influenced me, but more writers who have that spirit of place in their writing. Hunter S. Thompson might not have written about monuments, but he captured what was happening in the street. Langston Hughes’ Simple Stories never really ventured to give physical descriptions of the streets of Chicago or New York, but the conversations that went on in those bars let you know what was going on outside the saloon.
I don’t think that Ian Frazier can be considered a travel writer as such, but a book like Great Plains is one of the most accurate portraits of the fly over states that I have ever read. I’ve mentioned Tim Mackintosh-Smith. He is an absolutely fantastic storyteller, someone with great empathy for a part of the world that greatly needs it. Freya Stark is another example of an incredible polyglot. Her language skills gave her the opportunity and access to worlds and cultures that few outsiders had ever achieved. And to top that, being a woman in a very different time and place(s) makes her observations that much more interesting. Another hero of mine is William Dalrymple. His From the Holy Mountain inspired me so much that I traced much of it through Syria before the civil war started. His prose always just takes me away. Another writer I have been reading in recent years is Richard Grant. He started off as a travel writer but his recent writing has been more about in-depth explorations of interesting places by living in them. This is something I can really relate to. His Dispatches from Pluto about living in Mississippi is a fine example of that.
Just to add a little under-the-radar Canadiana into the mix, I’d highly recommend trying to find The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet. It’s an amazing story of a woman who takes her five children up the wild British Colombia coast in a boat in the 20s and 30s. This is still one of the most magical places in the world and it gives you an idea of how remote it was until only relatively recently. I think this book has seen a resurgence in recent years, but when I first read it long ago, it was mostly known very locally.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
This is hard for me to say, simply because I have never actually considered travel writing or writing in general to be a way to make a living. It’s just something I do, something that I need to do to keep me sane. I truly admire the people that do seem to make a go at it, but from the outside it seems like they are always scrambling and yes, having to write those listicles to help stave off the boogeyman. I guess this is something all artists have to do at a certain stage of their careers, but it still has to be demoralizing. I’m not sure that I am anyone to really give advice on this matter, but if I had to choose one thing, it would be to read. Read the people who came before. It’s like music, you’ve got to listen in order to learn and with writing I think it is the same. You need to read in order to write. Period.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
I think one of the biggest rewards in life in general is travel. Personally, it has been the single most transformative force in my life. Travel is what has made me into the person I am today. All of the experiences that I have had along the way on the road have forged me into the person I am. Those moments of getting out of my comfort zone and being faced with customs, languages, food, and even head gestures that are completely new to me is what has made me grow as a person. Travel enables you to reflect on what you have always ‘known’, or at least thought you knew, and turns it upside down and makes you take another look. It really challenges the idea you might have that you really ‘know’ something. Because you might go somewhere and see someone doing what you have always done or known in a completely different manner and perhaps much better than you have ever done, or at least more efficiently or elegantly.
This goes the same with thoughts and ideas. Travel teaches you that you know less than you think and this is humbling. Mark Twain’s well-trodden quote has never been truer than today, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” He wrote this long ago and unfortunately it seems truer today than perhaps it did back when he wrote it. The world is gravitating towards a more insular us-versus-them dynamic. The idea of ‘othering’ is seeing a resurgence and is being actively promoted by certain hateful groups and this dangerous current is catching on through social media and growing at an alarming rate.
Maybe the biggest reward for a travel writer, or perhaps contribution that we can make, is to humanize these ‘others’. To go to these places and reveal to the world that there are more similarities than differences between us. To show the world that the people in Gaza, Yemen, El Salvador, Sudan, Nunavut, North Florida, West Virginia and Brooklyn have much more in common with each other than differences. Anthony Bourdain was particularly good at this, and he was fortunate to have an enormous loudspeaker to broadcast his message (his writing for the program is also phenomenal). His loss has left a big hole I think. I think he may have encouraged more people to apply for passports than almost anyone. We need more Bourdains in this world and less of those ‘others’.
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