No one reads an anthology more critically, I once wrote, than the writer left out of it. Another critical reader is a travel writer reading a piece about his own town.
A friend recently sent me a book, a collection of essays by a bright young writer. The first, I noted with interest, is set in Ft. Lauderdale and appeared in one of The Best American Travel Writing anthologies (one of the few editions I don’t own).
The essay is not really about Ft. Lauderdale – it’s more about the author’s existential angst while vacationing here – but there are a number of references to the city, many of them wrong. It is continually referred to as “tropical” – a mistake many travel writers make, especially those from lands without palm trees, but one that an MFA-wielding intellectual should be above.
Staying on the beach, he more than once makes his way to “the boardwalk” (we call it a sidewalk). Watching TV, he catches a commercial for “Swedish Cruise Lines” (Norwegian readers will not be happy). Later he writes of “this cloudless swath of South Florida,” a place that, as every resident knows, hosts an almost daily riot of cloud formations. Not to mention that earlier, crossing the state line from Georgia, he finds himself in “a corridor of sugarcane and everglades,” as if Florida’s border was around Lake Okeechobee.
Clearly they don’t teach reporting in MFA programs.
