Friends and vagabonders,
As 2019 nears its end, I wanted to check in and recap some of the things I’ve done and places I’ve traveled this year. From traversing the Indonesian island of Sumatra (as well as Sri Lanka, Dubai, and the Republic of Georgia), to speaking at the Kazakh equivalent of TED Talks, to teaching in Paris and Mexico, to launching a second season of my podcast Deviate, it’s been a busy year. Here’s a recap of the highlights.
A winter journey across Asia
As I noted in my last update, 2019 began for me with a three-month journey across Asia, 20 years to the day after embarking on my first vagabonding trip across Asia.
Though much of this adventure will serve to fuel future writing projects, I created a Dispatches category on this blog, which showcases short, near-real-time dispatches (often spinning off from my Instagram posts) from places like Sumatra. Notable dispatches from that part of the world include “Using (and hacking) paper travel guidebooks, 25 years on,” the “People of Sumatra” series, several posts about how inexpensive it is to travel in Sumatra, the spectacle of the pacu jawi cattle races, what happens when Instagram-influencer type waterfall selfies go wrong, the moments we leave out of our social-media travel narratives, the joys of fantasy on the road, and several posts about the complexity of the Mentawai tribal culture on Siberut Island.
This journey also sparked a retrospective long-form essay, “5 Ways Indie Travel Has Changed — And Stayed The Same — Since 1999,” as well as a spinoff episode for my podcast.
Deviate podcast Season Two
The second season of my podcast Deviate debuted this spring, and it had somewhat of a retro feel, perhaps most notably in “Van Life before #VanLife: Rolf unpacks his very first vagabonding journey” – an episode where, exactly 25 years after my first long-term journey around North America, I reminisce for nearly two hours about the experience with my old friend (and fellow traveler) Jeff Nienaber. Not only did this episode carry a lot of meaning and poignance for me personally (including this tie-in post featuring my old photo album from the trip), it also proved to be one of the most popular Deviate episodes of 2019.
Other Deviate episodes with a retro tie-in include a recollection of my attempt to storm Leonard DiCaprio’s movie The Beach 20 years ago, as well as 20-. 25-, and 30-year retrospectives on such movies as Do the Right Thing, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, American Beauty, and David Lynch’s The Straight Story. Individual episodes featuring travel, life, or writing advice this season have included conversations with Pico Iyer, Paul Theroux, Ryan Holiday, Bettina Gilois, Pauline Frommer, Matt Kepnes, Alastair Humphreys, Sarah von Bargen, Seth Kugel, and Benjamin Percy.
My most listened to Season Two episode thus far is a 2.5 hour conversation with comedian Ari Shaffir about my experience of trying psychedelic mushrooms for the first time.
Teaching in Paris (and points beyond)
This year proved to be my most ambitious teaching stint in Paris – featuring not just my annual monthlong creative writing class, but also a one-week travel-memoir class, as well as an intensive Big Idea Book Bootcamp for accomplished professionals hoping to share their expertise with the world. I also gave a number of presentations at Kazakhstan’s “Go Viral Festival,” including keynotes about vagabonding and travel-storytelling – and I taught a one-week travel-memoir class in the beautiful city of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Variations of all of these classes will be on offer in 2020; please check my Events page or my Paris Writing Workshops page for more details.
In the meantime, I continue to blog from time to time about Writing Craft – including “A short guide to “close reading” nonfiction,” which I originally compiled during my two-year stint of teaching English 120 at Yale University. Elsewhere, my monthly series of interviews with working travel writers entered its nineteenth year, featuring Q&A with the likes of Faith Adiele, Ken Ilgunas, Leon Logothetis, Oneika Raymond, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Rory Nugent, and Camille T. Dungy.
Other recent, writing-oriented projects include an essay about the Jane’s Addiction album “Nothing’s Shocking” in Bloomsbury’s The 33 1/3 B-Sides anthology; a Q&A for the paperback edition of Kate Harris’s award-winning travel book Lands of Lost Borders; a blog essay about how my 1984-86 journals prove that the Netflix show Stranger Things is essentially the story of my youth (minus the demogorgons), and a nod to my book The Geto Boys in the Washington Post obituary of gangsta rapper Bushwick Bill.
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