There have been many tributes to Annie Dillard, the brilliant essayist who died on Tuesday. My favorite recalled that, when young people told her they wanted to be writers, she asked them, “Do you like sentences?” To me it was an obvious question, but apparently many people were taken aback by it.
The account of my formative visit to a (then) uncelebrated city appears in the Autumn issue of The American Scholar. https://theamericanscholar.org/lisbon-1989/
I’ll be at Books & Books in Coral Gables tonight talking about my memoir with Carlos Frías. When I scheduled the event back in the spring, I was pretty sure we’d have a hurricane on Sept. 2. Instead, the weather looks pretty good and, since it’s a conversation, I don’t have to do any preparing.
For freelancers, the end of August is like the end of December. You can send things out, but you’re pretty sure no one’s going to be around to read them.
Recently I spoke with Nathan James Thomas, editor of the excellent online travel magazine Intrepid Times, and our conversation is now available: https://intrepidtimes.com/2026/07/thomas-swick-on-why-bad-travelers-can-make-the-best-travel-writers/
We talked about my memoir, Poland (where Nathan now lives), unsung places, and travel writing, including the reason bad travelers often make good travel writers.
Apparently a number of people, inspired by the movie, are reading The Odyssey – or claiming to. I am not one of them. I read it in 2003, before a trip to Greece for the Sun-Sentinel, and while I know there have been new translations, notably one by Emily Wilson (daughter of A.N.), I was not captivated by it the way I was by the The Iliad. This might seem surprising – a war poem versus a travel poem – until you learn that I read The Iliad while auditing a class on Greek literature in translation at Florida Atlantic University. The professor – one of the best professors I ever had – made that epic poem come to life in a way that I, reading The Odyssey by myself, was unable to. And I’m not going to give it another try. I plan to give the movie a pass too.