Big City Tavern on Las Olas last night was hosting a number of groups; we found the Penn alumni at the front end of the bar.
"Did you go to Penn?" an older man asked me.
"Villanova," I said. "But my brother went to Penn, my dad went to Penn Law School, and my wife who's over there went to Penn grad school." That seemed to satisfy him.
Still, I felt a little out of my league. Until people asked me what I did for a living.
"I'm a travel writer," I said, and that statement - in a room full of lawyers and financial advisers - got people's attention. They asked my favorite places, how I traveled, where I'd been recently, where I'd been published. "I have a piece," I said naturally, to the sound of an imaginary drum roll, "in the October Smithsonian." It almost made all the waiting to hear from editors - a fact of the travel writer life that never entered their fantasies - seem worthwhile.
My latest story is now nearly 4,000 words, and it's not close to completion. If I were still at the newspaper, I would have been condensing 2,000 words ago, and thinking about how to turn it into a two-parter.
What a luxury it is to use all my material, to write a descriptive, detailed, leisurely story. This is the advantage of writing on spec, the joy before the frustration of trying to find the piece a home.
Wednesday evening I came home to find a large envelope propped against the door. Opening it up, I found the October issue of the Smithsonian inside. Turning to page 76, I saw my article about walking the Kiso Road in Japan. I looked at it with joy, but also a little sadness.
I took the trip last November; the story had been assigned in June. It was my first success with a magazine my neighbors had heard of. So for over a year, when people asked how the freelancing was going, I mentioned the Smithsonian. And that invariably ended the questioning. The name carried so much weight that it satisfied all curiosity. Nobody asked what other work I was getting. Though people I saw regularly would sometimes inquire about the status of my National Geographic story.
Now I have only a month and a half - till the end of October - to continue citing the Smithsonian as the mark of my success. Though if nothing else impressive comes along, I guess I can always say, when people ask how it's going, "I had a piece in the Smithsonian." At least until Christmas.
This morning I came across the blog of a travel writer who is traveling around the world without luggage. I'm waiting for the travel writer who has the courage and audacity to travel around the world without blogging.
I will be gone for two weeks as I take a little trip to Italy, focusing on Sicily. I've been there virtually over the last few months, reading Goethe - "Without Sicily, Italy leaves no clear and lasting impression; this place is the key to everything." - and one of my favorite travel writers, Norman Lewis, whose travel book, In Sicily, begins with this oddly-weighted sentence: "My early fascination with things Sicilian grew from a close acquaintance with Ernesto Corvaja, in whose London house I lived for several years and whose daughter Ernestina I had married."
I also read, finally, Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, which in parts was better than any travel book at giving me a feel for Palermo: "It was the religious houses that gave the city its grimness and its character, its sedateness and also its sense of death which not even the vibrant Sicilian light could ever manage to disperse."
When I tell people what I do for a living, the reaction is almost always the same, some variation on: "What a great job! I would love to be a travel writer."
I used to try to explain, after my initial agreement, that it's not like they think, that I'm not on vacation, enjoying the sights; I'm trying (sometimes futilely) to meet interesting people, learn new things, find a compelling story.
But I've stopped doing that. Now I look at the person with interest and ask: "Really? What was the last travel book you read?"