Scenes from South Florida: https://realsouthwestmag.com/2024/11/south-florida-days/
On my way back from Lancaster last week, I stopped in Wayne, a pretty Main Line town I used to hitchhike to when I was a student down the road at Villanova. Back then there was a paperback bookstore on Lancaster Pike; now there’s a bookstore, Main Point Books, on the perpendicular N. Wayne Ave.
Walking in I saw something I hadn’t seen in a while: a display of all the new Best American anthologies: Essays, Short Stories, Mystery and Suspense, etc. The one that caught my eye was Food and Travel Writing. Food had always had its own anthology, as had Travel, before it was discontinued in 2022. The return of travel writing was encouraging, even if it had to hitch its wagon to food.
Opening up the anthology, I found that almost all of the stories were about food – not surprisingly, as few writers had known about travel’s rebirth. One of the travel pieces was an essay on the fate of travel writing by the former editor of the Travel series, a man who, tellingly, now writes about wine and spirits.
Next year, presumably, there will be more of a balance. True, everybody eats and not everybody travels. But eating is almost always more pleasurable than reading about eating, while reading about travel is frequently more enjoyable than travel itself.
Last week I received an email from an editor asking if by chance I had anything to send him. (The editor is a friend who's started a new online magazine.) The subject line read: "Submit (but in a good way)."
Yesterday I drove to Sawgrass Mills and bought the summer issue of The Hedgehog Review at Books-A-Million. (One of Martin Amis’s writing rules is to write sentences that other people don’t write.) The theme of the issue was travel and, sitting outside while Hania shopped, I turned to the essay on travel writing. It was rich in academic mind-twisters (even though the author was not identified as an academic) that state the obvious, or the dubious, in a complicated fashion that seems more intent on demonstrating the brilliance of the writer than in making a point. “Travel writing, like travel, is all about the negation of partiality,” the author proclaimed, “ – how a partial and limited perspective can expand and communicate while remaining incomplete.”
A lot has been written about travel writing over the years - some of it by me, sometimes in quarterlies - and this writer found something new to say about it. She had penned a sentence that other people wouldn't write. But it didn't give me new insight into the nature of my profession. Clearly, travel writers experience only a fraction of the places they visit, but even that small sampling can be of value. That is both the nature of travel, and part of the reason we write about it.
Back in May, the Atlantic published a story by Gary Shteyngart about his experiences on the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world. I read it with interest – 28 years ago I wrote about my week on what was then the largest cruise ship in the world, the Carnival Destiny – and annoyance, in part because a lot of the piece was about the author and his discomfort. This annoyance led me to write an essay looking at writing about cruises over the decades, and how it has become more solipsistic: https://theamericanscholar.org/writer-on-board/
Thirty-five years ago this week I started my job as travel editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel (then the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel). I would hold the job for the next 19 years, visiting parts of the world – the Caribbean, South America, Asia, Australia – I had never been to before. In 2003 I published a book, A Way to See the World, comprised of stories I’d written for the paper (possibly the last collection of newspaper travel stories ever published). The Sun-Sentinel’s name appeared – either with selected stories or under “Notables” in the back – in the first nine editions of The Best American Travel Writing. The anthology, which debuted in 2000, was discontinued after 2021.