I recently finished Tim Hannigan's The Travel Writing Tribe. He approaches travel writing as both a thoughtful critic and a clear-eyed enthusiast, and through his wide reading – not just of travel literature but also academic studies of it – and his penetrating interviews with a diverse group of practitioners, he shows how this sometimes disparaged genre sparkles and illuminates by borrowing elements from all of the others. It is a scholarly work written for a general audience - the first for travel writing since Abroad in 1980 - but unlike Paul Fussell, Hannigan focuses on the contemporary scene. So it's not just a brilliant book but also a hopeful one.
The form rejection began, “Thanks so much for letting us look at your materials.” The “so much” rang false. I mean, if they were so grateful shouldn’t they at least have sent a personal rejection?
I’ve been debating whether to explain this to them or simply respond: “Thanks so much for your rejection.”
'The miracle of Christmas' is one of those expressions, like 'the kindness of strangers,' that you really want to be true. It's why I always send queries out in December.
The great Dave Frishberg, who died last week at the age of 88, wrote in "My Swan Song:"
I’ve nothing left to say. …
But I’ll say it anyway.
With publishing the way it is these days, my swan song may be the opposite.
Today on Literary Hub I write about the end of The Best American Travel Writing and what it says about travel writing - and about America: https://lithub.com/what-the-end-of-the-best-american-travel-writing-says-about-travel-writing-and-about-america/
Yesterday I started writing a blog post for today that grew into an article. It's short, 700 words, the length of a newspaper column or an Op-Ed piece, and if it goes unpublished it will become my longest blog post.