Nancy Marie Brown – Madam Mayo

Recommended Literary Travel Memoirs

This blog posts on Mondays. Second Mondays of the month I devote to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. Welcome!

> For the archive of workshop posts click here.

This is a list, not of any so-called cannon of the genre, but of the books that have been my teachers as I learned to write literary travel memoir. It also includes those I have read relatively recently and greatly admire. The ones that are starred are those that I have read and reread time and again; each, in its own way, has been vitally helpful to me, whether for shorter pieces such as A Visit to Swan House; longer ones such as From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion, or my books, among them, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California the Other Mexico. I aim to read many more literary travel memoirs, learn much more about the craft, and write more essays and books (indeed my book in-progress is a travel memoir of Far West Texas), hence I consider this an embryonic list.

If you, dear writerly reader, are writing literary travel memoir or anything in the realm of “creative nonfiction,” I would encourage you to read the books on this list; may you enjoy and learn from them as I did.

At the same time, I would encourage you, if you have not already, to make your own list of works that you have already read and— never mind what anyone else thinks— that you admired and loved. Then ask yourself: What do these works you so love and admire have in common? How do they handle descriptions of nature, or animals, of crowd scenes? Transitions? Dialogue? Sandwiching in the exposition? Narrative structure? Throw whatever writerly questions you can think of at these, your True Faves, and I’ll betcha bucks to buttons, they will teach you something valuable.

A final note: “Literary travel writing” can be defined in myriad ways. How far does one have to travel to consider it travel writing? The Pushkar camel fair would be fab, but I say, your own backyard will do. The idea is to see with new eyes and an open heart, then tell a good story.

Armitage, Shelley. Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place

Bain, David Haward. Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines

Berger, Bruce. Almost an Island

—. The End of the Sherry

—. The Telling Distance: Conversations with the American Desert.

—. A Desert Harvest
This splendid anthology collects selected essays from Bruce Berger’s masterwork of a desert trilogy, The Telling Distance, Almost an Island, and There Was a River. P.S. Read my Q & A with Bruce Berger apropos of the publication of this collection here.

Bogard, Paul. The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light.

*Brown, Nancy Marie. The Far-Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman

Buford, Bill. Among the Thugs

*Byron, Robert. The Road to Oxiana

Calderón de la Barca, Frances. Life in Mexico

*Chatwin, Bruce. In Patagonia

Childs, Craig. Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America

—. The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert

*Conover, Ted. Coyotes

—. Whiteout: Lost in Aspen

—. New Jack: Guarding Sing Sing (not precisely travel writing, but who’s to say? A masterpiece)

Ehrlich, Gretel. This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland

Ellis, Hattie. Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee

*Fergus, Charles. Summer at Little Lava: A Season at the Edge of the World

*Fisher, M.F.K. Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon

Ford, Corey. Where the Sea Breaks Its Back

*Frazier, Ian. Great Plains

*Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars
Not a travel memoir, rather its about travel memoir, nonetheless…

Gibson, Gregory. Demon of the Waters: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe
(Yes, I’m calling this a literary travel memoir. Here’s why.)

Godwin, Peter. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

*Iyer, Pico. Video Night in Kathmandu

Karlin, Wayne. Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and Living in Viet Nam

Kapuscinski, Ryszard. Travels with Herodotus

Klindienst, Patricia. The Earth Knows My Name

Larkin, Emma. Finding George Orwell in Burma

Martínez, Rubén. Desert America

*Mowat, Farley. Walking on the Land

*Morris, Jan. Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

Morris, Mary. The River Queen

*Naipaul, V.S. Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

*—. A Turn in the South

Nickerson, Sheila. Disappearance: A Map

Peasley, W.J., The Last of the Nomads

*Poncins, Gontran de. Kabloona

Quinones Sam. True Tales from Another Mexico

*Seth, Vikram. From Heaven Lake, Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet

Steinbeck, John. The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Swain, Jon. River of Time: A Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia

Synge, J.M. The Aran Islands

Taber, Sara Mansfield. Born Under An Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter

—. Bread of Three Rivers: The Story of a French Loaf

—. Dusk on the Campo: A Journey in Patagonia

Toth, Jennifer. The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City

Tree, Isabella. Sliced Iguana

Turner, Frederick. In the Land of the Temple Caves
Read my post about this book here.

Tweit, Susan J. Barren, Wild, and Worthless: Living in the Chihuahuan Desert

Wheeler, Sara. Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica

*White, Kenneth. Across the Territories: Travels from Orkney to Rangiroa

Whynot, Douglas. Following the Bloom: Across America with the Migratory Beekeepers

Wright, Lawrence. God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State

Q & A: Ellen Cassedy, Translator of On the Landing by Yenta Mash

Why I Am a Mega-Fan of the Filofax

Texas Pecan Pie for Dieters, Plus from the Archives:
A Review of James McWilliams’ The Pecan

My new book is Meteor

Conjecture: The Powerful, Upfront, Fair and Square Technique to Blend Fiction into Your Nonfiction

One of the gnarliest challenges in writing nonfiction is that oftentimes, no matter how thoroughly we do our reading and research, we just do not have the factual information to make an important scene come alive on the page. On the other hand, by its attention to specific sensory detail, fiction has the power to incite a “vivid dream”in the reader’s mind. But, by definition, aren’t we supposed to avoid fiction when we write nonfiction?

I write what’s called “creative nonfiction” or “literary journalism” — and this does not give me license to mislead my reader. What the adjectives ” creative” or “literary” mean is that I make use of various lyrical techniques in writing nonfiction. One of these is conjecture.

My writing assistants demonstrate conjecture. ULI: What if we could jump through the glass? WASHI: Squirrelburger!!

Conjecture is a powerful way to upfront, above-board, nada de funny-business, blend the magic of fiction into your nonfiction and so limber it up, stretch it out, let it breathe… and thus help your readers more clearly see a situation, a personality, animal, thing, a feeling, an interaction, or whatever else it might be that needs more depth, a star-gleam of vividness.

Foolishly, certain historians, la de da, just make things up, or, to say the same thing, without a shred of credible evidence, assert as fact what they would like to believe and/or what makes for the best story. And when these historians are found out, so much the worse for their reputations. And I say “foolishly” because those so-called “historians” could have honestly achieved the same effect for the reader, should that have been called for (sometimes it’s not), by instead offering their conjecture.

Academic historians tend to steer wide-clear of conjecture. That said, one of my favorite history podcasters, Liz Covart, host of Ben Franklin’s World, always ends an interview with an invitation to conjecture. And I am sure that you, dear writerly reader, can also offer some fine examples of exceptions.

On the other hand, many writers of creative nonfiction / literary journalism / popular history frequently make use of conjecture.

Think of it this way: We generally do not pick up an academic journal unless we are obliged to, while creative nonfiction is oftentimes the just the thing for the beach bag– and not necessarily because it is less intellectually nutritious.

Yeah, I go for intellectually nutritious beach reading.

In the following brief examples taken from works of creative nonfiction / literary journalism note how the author clearly signals to the reader that he or she is not asserting a fact, but offering conjecture.

Then Jesup got lucky. Abraham agreed to meet with him. He arrived at Jesup’s Fort Dade headquarters on January 31. The two men probably sat down in a rude, whitewashed office. An oil lamp would have provided flickering light. Jesup would have had on his dress uniform–lots of braid, and maybe some dangling medals. Abraham, in contrast, would undoubtedly have worn ragged deerskin, the sartorial legacy of fighting and hiding in the swamps.
––Jeff Guinn, Our Land Before We Die: The Proud Story of the Seminole Negro

Guinn’s clear signals to the reader that this is conjecture:
“probably”
“would have”
“maybe”
“would”

This had been a Columbian mammoth, the tracks circular, decayed, and toeless. There would be no scientific report on the find. We’d never be able to find these again or explain where they were, compass bearings too vague on this expanse, no GPS to drop a way-point. I walked alongside the tracks, and the mammoth rose up from the ground, its body filled in by my mind’s eye. It didn’t seem to notice me, it was focused ahead, tusks swaying back and forth as it traveled. It had hair, with rough brownish or gray skin visible underneath, but it was not woolly like its northern cousins…
––Craig Childs, Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America

Childs’ clear signal to the reader that this is conjecture:
“filled in by my mind’s eye”

In my dream I was walking a rural road in Aquitaine, high above a river, when my attention was drawn to something in the roadside woods–mound, barrow, some small heap of disturbed earth. On investigating this I found a partly distinterred Neanderthal skeleton, one humerus and a femur faintly daubed with red. Quite improbable, my waking mind told me…
— Frederick Turner, In the Land of the Temple Caves

Turner’s clear signals to the reader that this is conjecture / fiction:
“In my dream”
“Quite improbable, my waking mind told me”

Still, the old beauty sat on before her glass of wine, nursing it as she may have been nursing her memories. She was old enough, I judged, to have seen it all, as we say: the Great Depression when ordinary Parisians slept out on the portico of the Bourse; the fall of France and the Occupation; Algeria and de Gaulle’s triumphant return to power; the vandalizing of the city by Pompidou; the new age of the terrorist… She didn’t seem to be at all captive to some senescent trance but instead attuned to something not evident, listening maybe like the Venus figure of Laussel.
— Frederick Turner, In the Land of the Temple Caves

Clear signals to the reader that this is conjecture:
“as she may have been”
“I judged”
“maybe”
#

And at some immeasurably remote time beyond human caring the whole uneasy region might sink again beneath the sea and begin the cycle all over again by the slow deposition of new marls, shales, limestones, sandstones, deltaic conglomerates, perhaps with a fossil poet pressed and silicified between the leaves of a rock
—Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundreth Meridian (p.169)

Clear signals to the reader that this is conjecture:
“might”
“perhaps”

He might see, as many conservationists believe they see, a considerable empire-building tendency within the Bureau of Reclamation, an engineer’s vision of the West instead of a humanitarians, a will to build dams without die regard to all the conflicting interests involved. He might fear any bureau that showed less concern with the usefulness of a project than with its effect on the political strength of the bureau. He might join the Sierra Club and other conservation groups in deploring some proposed and “feasible” dams such as that in Echo Park blow the mouth of the Yampa, and he might agree that considerations such as recreation, wildlife protection, preservation for the future of untouched wilderness, might sometimes outweigh possible irrigation and power benefits. He would probably be with those who are already beginning to plead for conservation of reservoir sites themselves, for reservoirs silt up and do not last forever, and men had better look a long way ahead when they begin tampering with natural forces.
–Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (p. 361)

Clear signals to the reader that this is conjecture:
“as I imagine”
“could have”
“perhaps”
“He might”
“He would probably”

Alas, I do not have my copy on hand to pluck out some choice quotes, but Nancy Marie Brown’s The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman is the most masterful example I have yet found of an historian using conjecture, and to brilliant effect. In this page-turner of a book Brown spins out the thousand-year old story of Gudrid the Viking who sailed from Iceland to Greenland, and to North America and, in her old age, made a pilgrimage to Rome. There is so much of value in The Far Traveler, both for learning about its subject (Icelanders; medieval life at the pioneer-edge of European settlement) and about the craft of writing itself. I would suggest that you buy a paperback copy, and read The Far Traveler with your writer’s eye, scribbling in your notes. (If you can get a fine first edition hardcover with the dustcover, keep it fine–out of the sun– and hang onto it!)

Finally, an example from own longform essay of creative nonfiction, “From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion”:

Here, I supposed now, Maximilian must have imagined that he would return to his glittering dinner parties, and simpler, bachelors’ evenings of billiards, smoking, cards. He would write his memoirs of Mexico. Travel: why not an expedition to the Congo? Or Rajastan? And I had read somewhere that Maximilian had told someone (was it Blasio?) that one day he should like to fly balloons. This parterre would be the perfect place for a launch:

Late August 1867. A summer’s day, sparkling, sun-kissed sea. He is well again, he has put on weight. His entourage in tow, he strides across the gravel and steps into the basket of a billowing, parrot-green montgolfier emblazoned, of course, with “MIM.” And it lifts, up and yonder over the shining white tower of Miramar. From the basket sandbags splash to the sea — and it rises ever higher, ropes trailing.

A picnic in the clouds: chilled champagne, tiny toasts spread with foie gras.

“What’s so funny?” A. said.

I sighed, and put down my coffee cup. “It ended a little differently.”

My clear signals to the reader that this is conjecture:
I supposed now, Maximilian must have imagined
I sighed…. “It ended a little differently.”
[as explained previously, Maximilian was executed by firing squad]

So, where in your nonfiction manuscript does it make sense to use conjecture? You’re the artist! But I would whisper my little suggestion to you that it might be a place where, though you have little or nothing to go on, you would underscore the importance of a person (or some aspect of his personality or manner), animal, object, incident, or scene, and so invite the reader to slow down and pay special attention.

It can be, after all, a delightful thing to offer your conjecture.

For some practice with conjecture (as well as many other aspects of creative writing) check out “Giant Golden Buddha” and 364 More Five Minute Exercises,” which is available for free on my website. A few examples:

“Future Neighborhood”
Describe your neighborhood as you would expect it to appear 10 years from now.

“Take the Day Off”
If you were to take today off, what would you do? What would your brother or sister do? Your boss? Your neighbor? Smokey the Bear?

“Who Went to McDonald’s?”
This exercise is courtesy of novelist Leslie Pietrzyk.
Who is the most unlikely person— living or dead, famous or non— you can think of to be in a fast food restaurant? Okay— that person just walked into McDonald’s (or choose your own fave). Why are they there and what happens?

Diction Drops and Spikes

From The Writer’s Carousel: Literary Travel Writing

Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

The Power of Literary Travel Memoir: Further Notes on David M. Wrobel’s “Global West, American Frontier”

In this age of Instagram and Tripadvisor & etc. etc. etc. it would seem that increasingly fewer people have the interest, never mind the attentional focus, for literary travel memoir. But readers of this genre were always a tiny minority of the general population. I say, on this planet of billions of people, there will always be a good number of people who read, and read insatiably, seriously, broadly, and deeply. Ergo, we can be sure that someone somewhere will be writing something about someplace, and some number of these works, however small, will undoubtedly be read by some intelligent and thoughtful someone.

I write literary travel memoir and, on occasion, I teach a workshop on that genre, so when, as part of my reading for my book in-progress on Far West Texas, I came across cultural historian David M. Wrobel’s superb Global West, American Frontier, apart from its helping me get my mind around “Texas,” I felt moved to make a few notes on what he has to say about this oft-undervalued literary genre. Dear writerly reader, may you may find these quotes as heartening as I did.

“The travel book remained a key genre throughout the twentieth century, and still is today. In the early twenty-first century, when it is possible to fly to nearly anywhere in the world within a day and to travel virtually anywhere via the Internet, a quaint, old-fashioned printed companion remains surprisingly popular. A distinctive hybrid of the fiction and nonfiction forms, of reflection and reportage, of anthropology, history, and literature, still serves as an essential accompaniment for actual travel or provides core background reading for a journey.” (pp. 5-6)

“The truly gifted and valuable travel writers are, I would venture, the ones who come to realize that they are not just traveling through other landscapes but through the landscapes of other people’s lives; they are visitors who care to learn what a place means to the people who live there.” (p.13)

“[T]he travel narrative form has remained an important guide to western America even as new technological developments have compressed space and rendered the most faraway places more readily accessible. For this reason, the travel book can be deemed an unlikely survivor in the digital age.” (p.17)

“The travel book lives on, oblivious to the assumption that its time should long since have passed.” (p.187)

“The real authenticity or value of the genre surely lies in the expansiveness of the vision of its practitioners. This is why the travel book has persisted for nearly two centuries since its death was first announced and for more than three-quarters of a century since its demise was dramatically reproclaimed, and why today it seems as vital as ever, even though getting to almost anywhere in the world in next to no time at all is now more a chore than a challenge. The ease of travel does not restrict the vision of the obervant travel writer in the postmodern age any more than the difficulty of travel guaranteed smart observation in the premodern or modern periods.” (p.187)

“It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.” (p.187)

-David M. Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier

PS I would consider these among the best of the genre:

Nancy Marie Brown’s The Far-Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman

Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico

M.F.K. Fischer’s Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon

Gregory Gibson’s Demon of the Waters: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe [The end recounts his own journey]

V.S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South

Jon Swain’s River of Time: A Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia

See also the Q & A’s here on Madam Mayo blog with the brilliant Shelley Armitage (Walking the Llano); Bruce Berger (A Desert Harvest, etc.); and Sara Mansfield Taber (Bread of Three Rivers, etc).

For those of you who write or might consider writing literary travel memoir, on my workshop page I maintain an extensive list of recommended literary travel memoirs, as well as recommended books on craft.

My own book of literary memoir is Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico and, apart from a raft of shorter essays about Mexico City and the Texas borderlands, I have two longform essays of travel memoir now available in Kindle: “Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla” and “From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion.”