What’s to be done with the present tense and its unending popularity among travel writers and editors? In 2001, in his introduction to The Best American Travel Writing, Paul Theroux was already denouncing it, calling it “precious, self-regarding, a distraction.” It had been years since Theroux had taught, so he was unaware that it is also anathema to writing teachers, who spend a good deal of their time changing verbs from past to present in stories by students who forget that they started out in present and inevitably move to the more natural, and accurate, past tense (often before subconsciously reverting to present again). Life would be so much easier for everyone – students, teachers, readers – if travel stories were told in retrospect. Travel writers, we know you survived your journey, otherwise we wouldn’t have your words about it, so don’t pretend you’re still out there. And travel editors, free your writers – and readers – from the present. Unlike the past, it has never been called ‘a foreign country.’
