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Philadelphia City Paper



The Travails of Travel Writing



You would think that a conference entitled "Writing the Journey: A Conference on American, British and Anglophone Travel Writers and Writing" would actually be a safe place for travel writers. That type of thinking, surprisingly, would be misguided.



At various points during the University of Pennsylvania-sponsored conference last weekend, travel writing was referred to as "the last refuge of the hack" and "nothing if not formulaic" and "journalism’s tiramisu." Travel writers were called "talentless freeloaders" who were asked to "unlearn their habit of mapping the world as ‘other.’"



Patrick Holland, a scholar from the University of Guelph in Ontario who recently co-wrote a book called Tourists With Typewriters, summed it up like this: "Travel writing, it is suggested, is reprehensible in its insensitivity, obsolete and, in the age of globalization and virtuality, redundant."



Mighty bizarre conference to say the least. Most of the weekend sessions consisted of sitting in Sheraton University City meeting rooms listening to esoteric, academic papers with such captivating titles as "Travel, Identity and the Spectacle of Modernity," or "Narrating ‘Other’ Times and Spaces in a Postcolonial Age," or "The Commerce of Travel: Gender, Genre and the 18th Century Traveler" or "Exploring Liminality: The Spatial Politics of Travel and Gender Identity in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letter."



Apparently, travel narratives have become the most recent darling for the trendy humanities and lit-crit set, who scour travel books, both well known and hopelessly obscure, for evidence of postcolonialism, postimperialism, patriarchy and other evils. The hundred or so scholars who attended retain hopes that "Travel Studies" will soon become a valid field of scholarship within the academy. After all, travel writing as a genre contains all the hegemony, diachrony and gender politics that contemporary scholars live for.



Actual living and breathing travel writers did appear at the conference, including famed British author Colin Thubron, who gave the keynote address on "The Travel Writer Today."



"Travel writing," Thubron said sheepishly, "is relegated to something people do in the gap between adolescence and maturity."



Thubron, however, reminded the audience that at home in Great Britain, travel writing enjoys a long popular tradition in the likes of books by Graham Greene, D.H. Lawrence and many others. "There is much less inspection of (travel writing) than in the United States," he added, politely.



Yet perhaps the most interesting — and telling — session took place on Saturday afternoon during a panel called "Travel Writers Talk About The Trade." The panel consisted of Thomas Swick, travel editor of the Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, and Howard Shapiro, travel editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.



These travel writer/editors were the harshest critics of all.



First, Swick ridiculed the professional travel writer’s jargon. How it’s no longer a weekend trip — it’s now a "getaway." Or to continue the criminal motif, an "escape." How cities with a proven track record are "gems." How any place with palm trees immediately becomes a "paradise." How any hotel in the city becomes "elegant" and any hotel in the country becomes "rustic."



He opened a recent Sunday travel section of the New York Times, and defied the audience to find a story that didn’t have some variation of the line "my wife Heidi and I" at some point in the opening paragraphs.



Shapiro was surprisingly candid in his own lecture. "Travel editing these days is really like catching manna from heaven," he said. About the deluge of travel manuscripts he receives each week, he said: "We know most of them are going to be dreck."



As for why most of the travel stories he receives are so bad, Shapiro said simply: "We don’t pay enough." And then, in case the point hadn’t been driven home entirely: "We probably treat the writers as our last priority."



Shapiro said freelance writers are paid $200 for stories reported from the far reaches of the world, anywhere from Mongolia to Madagascar to Majorca. At the same time, he mentioned that the weekly Sunday travel section rakes in roughly $18 million a year in revenue.



That, unfortunately, didn’t stop him from railing further against the writing he receives. In fact, Shapiro, with great comedy, began opening some recent unsolicited manuscripts and reading them to the audience — with of course, much eye-rolling and snickering at the bad, bad, bad writing.



"We have a stable of writers who are lawyers," he said. "They are probably our best writers. First of all, they can afford to go to these places. This may sound elitist, but it’s true."



–Jason Wilson



The Travails of Travel Writing