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
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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).
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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.”
Literary Travel Writing:
Notes on Process and the Digital Revolution
From The Writer’s Carousel: Literary Travel Writing
A Visit to the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América
in Mexico City
Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.
