The Writing Life Too

Clouds obscuring the sky this morning. I love reading a good travel writer for a bit of armchair travel, and the September issue of Smithsonian magazine features six travel writers' dream assignments. The writers are Susan Orlean, Francine Prose, Geoffrey C. Ward, Caroline Alexander, Frances Mayes, and Paul Theroux.

Here are the first two paragraphs of an introduction to the series by Jan Morris: “Now that nearly everyone has been nearly everywhere, it might be thought that travel writers have lost their purpose. In a way they have. Only the most spectacularly perilous journey is nowadays worth writing a book about, and a public almost surfeited with TV travelogues rarely needs to be told what foreign parts look like.

Ah, but what they feel like is something else, and in a profounder sense the best travel writers are not really writing about travel at all. They are recording the effects of places or movements upon their own particular temperaments—recording the experience rather than the event, as they might make literary use of a love affair, an enigma, or tragedy….”