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WRITER’S RETREATS are more than just a places to stay. In addition to space, many provide community support, resources, and workshops to help writers improve their skills while they complete major writing projects.

Retreats can last anywhere from a few weeks or months to a whole year, and vary in structure. Some have set time limits while others allow the writer a choice of schedules. Even the number of artists in residences at one time varies greatly depending on the program.

Gaining acceptance into one of the more established programs is nearly unheard of for beginning writers, however don’t get discouraged. At more-recently established retreats, less experienced writers have an excellent shot at acceptance.

Residencies are located all over the world and welcome writers at all levels. Some are genre-specific, focusing on poetry or fiction. Here are a few retreats that welcome writers of creative nonfiction, which includes travel writing.

Edward F. Albee Foundation William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center, New York

www.albeefoundation.org

Edward F. Albee Foundation William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center, also known as “The Barn” is an artist’s retreat in Montauk, New York, that accepts up to five guests at a time for stays of 4-6 weeks from May to October. There’s no application fee and no charge to stay at the retreat, but space is limited and admissions are highly competitive.

Applicants for non-fiction residencies will need to submit three essays or articles, a resume, a one page “artist’s statement”, and two letters of recommendation. Applications are accepted from January 1 to March 1.

Artcroft Creative Residency Program, Kentucky

www.artcroft.org

Located an hour northeast of Lexington, the Artcroft Creative Residency Program accepts creative nonfiction writers for retreats of 2-4 weeks all year round. The program accepts up to six artists at a time and there is no charge.

The colony provides transportation from the airport and basic food staples and in return residents are expected to contribute 20 hours per week to working on the farm and in the community. Applicants will need to submit the $30 application fee, two personal and two professional references, a resume, a one-page description of the work they wish to undertake during the retreat, two work samples, and proposals for the work they can contribute to the community and to the retreat’s work exchange.

Leighton Artists Colony at the Banff Center, Alberta, Canada

www.banffcentre.ca

Leighton Artists Colony at the Banff Center offers ongoing flexible-stay retreats for artists, writers, and composers. There is a $75 application fee, a nightly charge for residency and an optional meal plan at additional cost. Scholarships are available.

First time applicants will need to submit a resume, a description of the project they’ll be working on, three letters of recommendation, and a selection of published works or manuscripts in progress. Applications are accepted throughout the year, but should be submitted six months before the desired residency dates.

The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow , Arkansas

www.writerscolony.org

The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow offers stays of two weeks to three months from mid-March to mid-December to writers of genres including non-fiction, journalism, and culinary writing. Writers are asked to contribute what they can to the cost of their stay, though fellowships are available to help fund the retreat. There is no application fee.

To apply, writers need to submit a list of publications and of any prizes they’ve been awarded, two references, and a work sample of no more than ten pages. Each writer will also be asked to contribute time to a local outreach program during the stay. Applications are due in September for the following year.

Writers in the Heartland, Illinois

www.writersintheheartland.org

Writers in the Heartland, located in central Illinois, opened in 2008 and hosted its first writers in 2009. Up to five writers at a time will be welcomed for stays of one week, two weeks or one month in September or October. For the first year, only writers from the Midwest were accepted, but this may change in the future.

There is a $15 application fee, but accommodations and meals at the retreat are free. Prospective residents will need to submit a cover letter, resume, and work sample of 25 pages or less by mid-April for the following year. As this colony is new, it isn’t well known, so there might not be much competition and newer writers may have a better chance of being accepted.

The Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s Residency, Massachusetts

www.writersresidency.com

The Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s Residency is another newcomer. It was established in 2007 and welcomes up to eight writers at a time to stay for two weeks to one month during October. The residency cost is $150 per week, which includes accommodation in a historic inn, but not meals or transportation.

For consideration, applicants need to submit a biography with publication history, a work sample of up to 20 pages, and a statement of purpose outlying the project that will be undertaken at the retreat. Applications are due via email by March 1 for the October residency.

Andrew’s Forest Writers Residency, Oregon

www.andrewsforest.oregonstate.edu

The Long-Term Ecological Reflections Program at the Andrews Forest in Oregon is a residency offered to writers “whose work reflects a keen awareness of the natural world”. Depending on the project that will be undertaken while at the residency, this could include travel writers.

Residents stay for one week during March, April, May, September, October, or November, and receive a stipend of $250. Applications include a work sample of up to 15 pages and a one-page statement describing the writer’s proposed project and how it fits into the mission of the Forest. While at the retreat, writers will have the chance to work with research scientists and their writing will appear in The Forest Log anthology.

Hedgebrook – Washington

www.hedgebrook.org

Up to seven women writers at a time stay at Hedgebrook, a colony on the coast of Washington state, for 2-6 weeks from February to November. Several hundred apply each year but only about 40 are chosen, so the competition is tough.

The retreat accepts both published and unpublished writed, so even those who haven’t made a name for themselves have a fair shot. The application costs $25 but the program is free. Application requirements include a writing sample of up to five pages and two personal essays. The essays detail the work of the writer, why she wishes to attend the retreat at Hedgebrook, and how her work will benefit from her time there. Applications are accepted through September for the following year.

This is only a small sampling of the residency programs out there. Here are some things to consider when choosing your residency.

Overall Considerations for Writer’s Retreats

Don’t worry about geography.

With the exception of the cost of getting to the colony, the location matters little. You can just as easily find a secluded space in the middle of a big city as you can in a more rural area. The setting is more important.

If you need fresh air and nature, pick a retreat set on a farm or forest where you can go for walks on the property when you need a break. If you require more stimulation, a colony in a city or small town might better.

Determine Your Preferred Work Style

Some retreats offer complete solitude. Others have a more communal atmosphere after work hours. Some offer a dedicated studio space and others expect writers to work in their rooms. Think about which situation will allow you to focus most easily and choose the retreat that fits your style best.

Calculate All the Costs

The total cost of the colony is more than the price of staying there. If food and transportation aren’t included, figure that in as well. If you work full time, keep in mind the cost of the salary you’ll be sacrificing.

This many affect how long you can afford to stay at the colony. A few retreats offer short stays. If the price is more than you can afford, look into retreats that offer fellowships to defray the cost.

Apply to Several Retreats

Applying to more than one retreat may increase your chances of being accepted. If a more popular retreat rejects you, a less well-known one might gladly welcome you. Being flexible on dates and applying to year-round retreats may also help you get accepted. If you are rejected one year, you can always apply again the following year.

Community Connection

Do you have experience as a writer in residence? Have you always wanted to take a writers retreat? If you were to dedicate 6 months to writing what would it be?

Image: 5533

THIS POST really began 3 weeks ago in a piece called 3 writing styles that ruin your stories. It was supposed to be about awareness of styles, but what really came out was an attack on marketing language.

I feel like I’ve been trying to clarify something in my mind ever since.

A couple weeks later, David Page wrote “Do ‘freebies’ undermine honesty in travel writing?” It was a reaction to the New York Times and Newsweek and other publications’ policies prohibiting writers from having any “material connection” (i.e. comps or freebies) to their subject matter, which, as he pointed out, often leads to writers simply pretending they don’t have material connections.

Finally, yesterday, as I was finishing a very quick post on the circulation losses all but one of the top 25 major dailies I wrote “news needs to come from ever more local sources, and, in my opinion, be liberated of the classic ‘objective’ paradigm, moving instead towards a new ethic of material transparency.”

That last little term just kind of appeared. I don’t remember reading it anywhere, but it seems to describe what it is I’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks. And since I feel like I’m claiming it here, I need to elaborate:

Material Transparency:

1. Material Transparency is an underpinning or ethic of a writer’s personal brand.

It’s based on the artistic goal of writing with as much credibility or transparency as possible, (see this piece by Tom Gates for a good example), and the professional goal of having this transparency or style itself be ‘marketable’.

2. The original blueprint for Material Transparency is New Journalism.

When Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and others abandoned ‘objective’ reporting, instead writing subjectively and recognizing their own part in / effect on a story, they revealed truths about character, place, and events that could not be accessed otherwise.

3. The key stylistic element of Material Transparency is self-awareness.

When a writer simply says something, but says it in a way that is overtly aware of his / her limitations, problems, dilemmas, biases, stoke, it increases credibility. When a writer uses words or rhetoric to ’suggest’ something, it becomes less transparent.

4. The key professional element of Material Transparency is self-promotion and/or promotion of your crew.

The currency of the internet is mentions, pageviews, links. Whether the mentions are positive or negative seems to matter less than how many there are.

How can you use your unique story, style, and material connections to increase the relevance of your own personal brand and thus make you more attractive to other writers, editors, sponsors, publishers?

5. Getting paid or comped or sponsored or hooked up in any way always has to be recognized explicitly.

Ideally this should be part of the story itself, part of the narration. Sponsors, advertisers, people in your crew–the biggest way you can promote them is to include them in your story.

6. Any product or service or artistic work that is reviewed must be done earnestly and transparently.

Remember that even reviewing something negatively still generates publicity for someone and has the overall effect of building interest.

7. Respect for other writers is based on skill and style as opposed to favoritism, or a writer’s putative achievements or recognition.

You should name who your influences are, be open about what you’re reading, listening to.

8. If everyone were materially transparent, we might not like what we read about ourselves or the world, but we’d have a better idea of who our friends and enemies really are.

Journalists should follow the example of Jorge Lanata and explicitly state their political positions.

Community Connection

Please share your thoughts and comments below.

Here are 4 of 157 videos Thomas has on his YouTube channel. Aside from shooting his own video, Thomas wants you to learn the techniques and gain the tools to fund your travels with video production.

How to make money with travel videos

Tutorial 1: Setting up your tripod and panning

Tutorial 2: How to record good audio

Here is an excellent example of Thom’s work:

Adelaide to Alice Springs Outback 4WD Safari

Visit Thom’s website, Filmingholidays.com or hit him up on his YouTube channel.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Get your fill of travel videos with 7 Most Inspiring Travel Video Channels on YouTube then once you are filled with inspiration, edit your own footage and upload to our YouTube group!

Image: dagpic

These numbers came out yesterday from Editor and Publisher. The only gain made by any top 25 newspaper was a less than 1% circulation increase by The Wall Street Journal.

Check out some of the losses. SF Chronicle down by more than 25 percent.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL — 2,024,269 — 0.61%
USA TODAY — 1,900,116 — (-17.15%)
THE NEW YORK TIMES — 927,851 — (-7.28%)
LOS ANGELES TIMES — 657,467 — (-11.05%)
THE WASHINGTON POST — 582,844 — (-6.40%)

DAILY NEWS (NEW YORK) — 544,167 — (-13.98%)
NEW YORK POST — 508,042 — (-18.77%)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE — 465,892 — (-9.72%)
HOUSTON CHRONICLE — 384,419 — (-14.24%)
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER — 361,480 — N/A

NEWSDAY — 357,124 — (-5.40%)
THE DENVER POST — 340,949 — N/A
THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC — 316,874 — (-12.30%)
STAR TRIBUNE, MINNEAPOLIS — 304,543 — (-5.53%)
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES — 275,641 — (-11.98%)

The PLAIN DEALER, CLEVELAND — 271,180 — (-11.24%)
DETROIT FREE PRESS (e) — 269,729 — (-9.56%)
THE BOSTON GLOBE — 264,105 — (-18.48%)
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS — 263,810 — (-22.16%)
THE SEATTLE TIMES — 263,588 — N/A

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE — 251,782 — (-25.82%)
THE OREGONIAN — 249,163 — (-12.06%)
THE STAR-LEDGER, NEWARK — 246,006 — (-22.22%)
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE — 242,705 — (-10.05%)
ST. PETERSBURG (FLA.) TIMES — 240,147 — (-10.70%)

I’d be interested to see a side by side comparison of these numbers with corresponding increases or decreases of traffic on newspapers’ websites.

Questions:

How is this overall trend impacting journalism school applications?

Which major city (population over 5 million) will be the first to go without a daily newspaper?

I’m not sure exactly how I feel about all of this. I remember Eva Holland mentioning all the travel editors at Book Passage last year foreseeing this and thinking ‘well, now we’ll have time to write our books.’

I guess my thought is that this is all part of the evolution of the form. News needs to come from ever more local sources, and, in my opinion, be liberated of the classic ‘objective’ paradigm, moving instead towards a new ethic of material transparency.

Community Connection

Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

Mural of Neruda in Chile. Photo: Magical-World

It all started with Neruda. Ten summers ago I read Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon, a bilingual edition translated by Stephen Mitchell.

At the time I knew nothing about Neruda or the way poetry and language could ‘define’ a place in time. Up until then the only thing that had done that was music.

That summer I was a camp counselor. I taught kids how to paddle. I’d go around dropping Neruda lines on anyone who’d listen–campers, other counselors. It became kind of a joke actually. I’d leave the book out so anyone could read it, and damn if it didn’t help to define that particular summer, the summer Neruda visited Camp High Meadows.

As I read the lines my eyes would drift across to the Spanish original and the strangely accented, Latinate words. I became fascinated and then all out obsessed. I wanted this language and rhythm and landscape.

All different factors came together after that. A couple thousand saved up. A gnarly breakup with longtime girlfriend. Within a year I was on a bus in Latin America listening to cumbia, head-tripped and depressed and stoked and trying to absorb the words.

My whole life has flowed from this. Strangely, it feels like ever since I’ve been both ‘living it’ and at the same time have been trying to ‘get back to it’. I think this is where writing comes from. Not writing so much as it’s framed in debates like this one, but more in the sense of writing as an almost existential need.

Poetry is the original form of storytelling (Iliad, Odyssey), and epic voyages were always at the center. In the 19th century, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was all about travel and place. In the mid 20th century was Neruda. Later you have Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and probably most importantly as far as travel and place, Gary Snyder.

Later in the late 20th century you have Raymond Carver, who wrote poems about looking out of windows in Europe and runways in Buenos Aires and street fairs in Mexico as well as into the strait from his own backyard in Port Angeles Washington.

As far as people still living, Jim Harrison writes poems about travel and places in Montana, Michigan, and the desert southwest. Billy Collins and Ted Kooser’s poems have elements of place, but seem more about little moments of ’seeing’ than anything else.

Moving from there to the younger generations, the only well known poet I can think of whose work has elements of travel or place is Sherman Alexie. But it’s interesting, place is usually just a backdrop in his work–there are few trees, mountains, rivers.

Who is doing it now as far as upcoming generations? Most of the poets I’ve been reading online lately like Tao Lin, Brandon Scott Gorell, and Kathryn Regina write about the world in a way that is very detached from location or travel. Is anyone writing something that could be called travel poetry, or poetry that focuses on place? I googled travel poetry and the results were ultra thin.

Looking at this progression (albeit not very comprehensively), I wonder:

Are we moving towards a language and poetry where place names, geography, knowledge of terrain, and ‘identity’ based on place is no longer relevant?

Has the only ‘legitimate’ form for writing on travel and place become limited to the narrative essay or memoir?

Who is writing poetry now that explores connections with place and travel?

Community Connection

Please let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Harbor in Långedrag, near Gothenburg. Photo: Anna Brones

Number of SAABS and Volvos on the road: too many to count

Family members visited: 9

Family members that own a SAAB or Volvo: 8

Number of times I’ve traveled alone with my mother since the age of 15 before this trip: 0

Times my mother and I were frustrated about not being able to talk about people in public because they spoke Swedish too: 26

Cities visited: 5

Hours spent in Stockholm: 7

Hours spent walking in Stockholm: 6

Number of times I consulted a Stockholm map: 1

Total hours spent on trains: 9

Cost of buying Karlstad to Stockholm train ticket at last minute: 600 SEK

Crayfish consumed in one evening in Gothenburg: 7

Days spent in Sweden: 10

Days someone mentioned threat of Swine Flu: 10

Jokes made about Swine Flu: 2

Swedes I know who think they’ve had Swine Flu: 1

Minutes between landing in Gothenburg and seeing an IKEA: 11

Bags of Swedish candy brought back in suitcase: 6

Meals that included potatoes: 10

Meals of blood pudding: 4

Days with less than two fika (coffee break): 1

Starbucks sightings: 0

IKEA sightings: 3

Postcards sent with photos of topless sunbathers: 3

Topless sunbather sightings: 0

Articles read in newspaper about the Swedish Royal Family: 3

Times I’ve been to Sweden: over 15

Number of bright green, marzipan covered Princesstarta (Princess Cake) eaten: 1

Fast food restaurants visited: 0

Age that I first learned to speak Swedish: 0

Times I had to speak English: 0

Pictures taken with bikes in them: 53

Time in the morning people started buying liquor at Stockholm Airport Duty Free: 6

Cans of reindeer pate snuck through customs: 2

Helpful: board, terrain, crew. Img: Laura Bernhein

SINCE BLOGGING ABOUT NaNoWriMo I’ve been thinking about what increases or decreases my ‘productivity’ as a writer.

First up, I believe that writing is a discipline, a craft, and that the most important thing is just dedicating time to it no matter where you are or what the environment is. That’s why I like the idea of NaNoWriMo.

But looking back over my journals from this past summer I realize there are just these flow-enhancing factors. Here are some of mine:

*Being on some kind of road trip where there’s a surf or paddle or snowboard mission involved.

*Working with my hands–carpentry, splitting wood, cleaning dishes–and always cooking something.

*Camping anywhere where this situation exists: at night you look around and see your family and friends around the fire.

What’s your most productive writing environment? Please let us know in the comments section.

Community Connection

For more on writing, check out Matador’s writing focus page.

EVERY NOVEMBER, a large group of people (there were more than 100,000 in 2007) who have signed up with NaNoWriMo begin writing with the goal of completing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. The program website states:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

It would be easy to make fun of this if I didn’t think it would actually be kind of fun to try (if I had time), and I didn’t believe there were benefits to just ‘dump it all out’ style writing where you don’t think but just type.

Questions:

*Has anyone at Matador or from elsewhere participated at NaNoWrMo? What was your experience?

*Is anyone interested in trying this year?

*What benefits are there to just sitting down and ‘freewriting’?

Please give your answers in the comments section below.

Community Connection

For more info on NaNoWriMo, check their site here.

Thrillist goes to Jamaica, Gaelen Harlacher photo

EVERY SO OFTEN, like the other day on Twitter (scroll through #twethics and you’ll get the gist), an old debate gets reheated about the relationship between the integrity of a particular piece of travel writing and who paid the bills to make it happen.

This round was brought on by the shameful discovery that Mike Albo, sometime contributor to the NYT, and Kurt Soller of Newsweek (Washington Post Co), had, in flagrant violation of their publications’ policies (i.e. No Freebies Allowed—Ever), enjoyed a lavish free trip to Jamaica, courtesy of Thrillist and Jet Blue.

The traditional theory being, of course, that as a “professional” journalist you should not be financially beholden to the subject you’re covering, but rather to the publication you’re writing for—and, by extension, your readers. Which sounds like a good idea. It’s not a long-standing tradition, mind you, in the grand history of storytelling and news/gossip/culture/advice delivery, but one that many people have come to feel very strongly about.

Gawker jumped on the transgressors. The publications in question backpedaled. Then came the twitstorm: “i wld feel gross abt all this if i wasnt so poor,” tweeted Albo. [author's note: and then he got fired.]

Which hit on an essential question: how is the average dirtbag travel journo—especially In These Times—supposed to pay for the travel he or she is writing about?

The whole thing is, of course, a bottomless can of worms.

Perhaps the best way to maintain independence as a travel writer is to have a large trust fund, or a productive uranium mine. The next best thing is to find oneself On Assignment for a well-endowed national publication that insists on paying all expenses. Which dreamy situation is unlike winning the lottery only in that it requires significantly more scratching. Like way beyond where the fingers bleed.

But what if you’re writing on spec? Or for one of the ever-proliferating legion of yet-to-be-monetized online mags (like, uh, this one)? What if you’re writing a guidebook, where even for a big-name series the budget for expenses (i.e. research) is, as the notorious and oft-reviled and also bestselling Thomas Kohnstamm famously pointed out: zero?

Do you just wander around the hallways of the five-star hotel and maybe sit on the beds? Or maybe just do a little critical reworking of the texts and images on the website? Or—what the hell, in the interest of actual experiential travel—do you accept a free night?

Then: is it enough to make it clear to your host that the free night—and the bottle of Armagnac and the fruit basket and the T-shirt and the go-go dancers, the custom skis and the moonlight horseback ride on the beach—will not necessarily translate to a flattering review? Are you strong enough to walk that line?

One amusing analogy made the rounds and was enjoyed by all:

worldhum Ha! RT @AEEvans Christopher Columbus went on a press trip to the Bahamas paid for by Queen Isabella PR & will never write for NYT #twethics”

Amusing indeed. But specious. The fact is, Columbus was on assignment, out to get the facts for his sponsors (like Marco Polo before him, and all manner of explorers and chroniclers thereafter, from Magellan to Lewis & Clark to Mark Twain to a well-addled Hunter S. Thompson in a hotel suite covering the Super Bowl for Rolling Stone). Had the ambitious Genoan’s ships and provisions been paid for by the Bahamas Tourism Bureau, his reports on the natives might have been filed with a slightly different tint.

Consider, by way of example, the late David Foster Wallace’s hilarious chronicle of a $3,000 Caribbean Cruise he once failed to enjoy, paid for by Harper’s Magazine. Would he have found himself tempering his irreverence ever so slightly had the trip been paid for by Celebrity Cruises, Inc.? Or would he have been able to spin it into even more hilarity?

The sad fact is, even straight-up assignment gigs may not be quite as squeaky as we’d like to think. Check out, for example, Chuck Thompson on NPR discussing the extent to which advertising drives content in the glossy travel mags, and how the result is, as he so eloquently puts it: “witless puffery, or the sun-dappled barf of travel writing.”

A cursory review of the latest glossies (i.e. Nat Geo Adventure) proves we’re headed ever more perilously in that direction. So do we consign ourselves to second-hand service schlock from the comfort of our respective caves? Or do we, as we always have, take it on the road and do our best to find a good couch to crash on?

This one, I think, hit the proverbial nail on the head:

“RT @nerdseyeview readers are best judge of ethics. write like a shill, they’re gone. write honestly, they stay. #twethics”

The reality, alas, is that it may take more than honesty to draw a reader all the way to the end of a piece of writing. But, well, it’s hard to think of a better place to start.

Community Connection

For more on the subject, check out Ian MacKenzie on the fizzle of Travel Channel’s “Confessions of a Travel Writer,” or Tim Patterson on the multiple personalities of travel writers.

What are your 2 cents? WTF are we to do? Help us out: tell us about it below.

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THIS IS THE WAY OF OUR TIMES: A man falls asleep reading a fine account of the rise and fall of the American Newspaper (in words printed on paper, in a magazine), from Gold Rush San Francisco to an equally tenuous present. He wakes to another rosy-fingered dawn over the White Mountains, as in a fable, or not, his children crawling all over him, kneeing him in the groin, laughing, pouting, fighting for his attention, clamoring for juice.

Later he takes his coffee (and a pancake formed in the shape of a squirrel by his visiting mother-in-law) to the basement, where, surrounded by exposed insulation, and with the light coming up on the trees outside, he puts off the task at hand—that of writing the texts for a guide to winter adventure in Mammoth, as commissioned by the Ski Area.

He scrolls through the morning’s tweets, comes upon the following from (of all possible sources) the Comfort Inn in Bishop (@ComfortInn395):

Check this video out–Winter in the Woods-Backcountry Skiing in the Sierra Nevada.

And so he does, of course, and is immediately transported far beyond his cluttered desk, beyond the world of newspapers and social media and a too-sluggish computer, to an earlier time—a better time, he cannot help but think—and a time very soon to come:

And now he is ready for winter.

Thank you David Huebner. For more of his goods—writing, photography, video—check out backofbeyond.org.

Girl in Goa, India. Photo: Steve Weaver

Biting into my Mediterranean sandwich at Baba Au Rum (feta cheese, black olives, sun dried tomatoes spilling from the sides of French bread), I think of the party I went to last night at one of the Yoga centers around Baga.

A dressed-in-white party. No exceptions. Everywhere I looked, bleached figures were floating across the grounds like sleep walkers. It is easy to be cynical about Westerners in Goa.

I joke to Aimee Ginsburg, a Westerner from Israel: “A lot of people looking for the perfect spiritual beach.”

She is not amused. She has reason not to be. Israeli Goans, relative newcomers, are lassoed inside lazy clichés: burnt out cases, exiles from an endless war.

Baga’s winter guests, often heavyset blokes from the UK, here for the warm sun and drinks at the beach shacks, or maybe even visits with the healer Patrick at Nani and Rani’s, sail innocently beneath my radar. What is transitory, like this author eating his Mediterranean sandwich among Baga’s old-timers, does not demand to be taken seriously.

I am happy, momentarily, to be part of the legendary weave of Westerners in India’s smallest state, only recently pried loose from Portugal. (Indian Goans are said to see us more as a fungus than a weave.)

I see myself as exempt from the normal clichés that swirl around the spirit junkies and beach slaves. I have come to Goa for none of the things Lonely Planet can offer me. I admit I say this smugly.

The woman who lives two houses down from me is the reason I am here. Outside her house is her blue motor scooter with its head tilted, as if trying to make up its mind about something.

Community Connection

Please submit notes from the road to david [at] matadornetwork.com

For another interesting perspective on travelers in India, check out this piece at BNT by Rolf Potts.

Photo MarthaRiley

Field Notes:

Sixty miles outside of Albuquerque, I’m standing on the dry table of Acoma Pueblo, having joined a tour with other white people, our skin blistering into a plastic doll color. We move like clouds, slow, unaffected, led through real people’s museum lives. I think there’s a story here, turning itself over in the dust, maybe a knot of stories — Acoma stories, whites with Acoma stories.

I never expected it to cut into me. The meshing and clashing of cultures, the Spanish forcing religion upon them. The church with its graves upon graves, built and buried in layers, a rising wall of false heads… All coated in sand, baked like their ovens.

This is everybody, most of them white. There are a lot of them, small and tall, fat and pale, but if you are looking down at them from the pueblo, they just look like golf tees lined up, brittle and wooden.

Kind of like this: I I I I II I I III I I

–From “Everything Gets Mixed Together at the Pueblo,” Crab Orchard Review Vol. 14, #2, Color Wheel: Cultural Heritages in the 21st Century, October 2009

On Writing and My Creative Process

At Acoma, a child held my hand and, like an antelope, guided me down a steep stone staircase, a narrow fissure carved by ancient waters, but she also guided me down into the story. I thought the words: “miracles, false and real.” They came and settled into the fissures of my brain, and I left them there.

Sometimes there’s a story before the story, and sometimes, one story splinters into more. Don’t be afraid of that. When something breaks, it makes a lot of noise. Just shut up and listen.

Find the place, dip into it, and then pull back, shards of other people’s stories, their voices, their wounds, sticking in you like glass. That part hurts a bit, someone else’s life under your skin. That’s okay. Other story-shards might fall away, ones you thought were important. Perhaps you’ll pick them up and use them later, or maybe you won’t. Keep pulling back, but leave the dust in your eyes, the cuts on your hands.

Then, finally: blink, look away. Write your story. Because now it’s your blood on the page, recording their voices. Their cinnamon fry bread on your tongue. Their antelope-child guide’s warm hand in yours. Listen. Get dirty. Bleed.

Community Connection

Elizabeth’s new novel Bone Worship can be pre-ordered at Amazon.

Photo babymellowdee

In the Cambodian border town of Poipet, Bridget and I share a cab ride with an excitable and elderly Frenchmen named Pierre. Triumphantly old and traveling the world alone, he is strenuously hard of hearing and very happy to be in Cambodia. Climbing into the car he looks like a Parisian Mr. Magoo; squinting, holding his camera askew and always stepping accidentally over danger, not into it.

We zoom in a punished old sedan, jumbling about bumping heads on the dirt highway while Pierre shoots photos and shouts, “Extraordinary!”

Pierre, Bridget and myself were all told by the same smiling Cambodian that the bus had broken down. We opted to pay five dollars each for a ride to Siem Reap. Pierre’s camera clicks indiscriminately as the puddles and paddies go by.

“This is really something, huh? Cracker Jack! The quality of light is perfect. Extraordinary!”

I don’t think any of his pictures are going to turn out.

Photo three wolves

On our second day of mountain biking around the temples of Angkor we were stopped on the bike path when Pierre shouts from behind,

“Jason, Bernice! I made it! Isn’t this the something, huh? Extraordinary!”

His knees and the rusty rental bike creak towards us.

“I saw you yesterday but you were a blur Jimmy, to be young again…oh well. Isn’t this extraordinary?”

I couldn’t help but think that Pierre in his shambling persistence to see it all was putting that apocryphal adage ‘Do it while you’re young’ on its head. Might he have something sage-like to impart on the topic?

“Hey Pierre, what would you say to those who tell me to ‘Do it while I’m Young?’”

“Huh?”

“I said, um, in regards to travel, what do you think of the statement ‘Do it while you are Young’?”

“Huh? Wait.Where?”

“People are always telling you to do it while you are young. What do you think?”

“Oh, well, I don’t know Jesse, I don’t think so. You go on ahead though, I should head back. I move pretty slowly you know.”

His face mustering the balance needed mount his bike is all the answer I’m gonna get.

Community Connection

Is boots-to-the-ground travel for the young or the young at heart? Let us know in the comments below.

Book Passage. Photo: ExperienceLA

I’ve never been to a writing conference. I have a strong aversion to most hotels, conference rooms, food-service by Sysco™, and one person on stage talking to a big group of people sitting in chairs.

This, of course, may or may not even be how conferences are, but it’s still how they reside in my imagination, perhaps a byproduct of OD’ing on Bar Mitzvahs as a kid.

Either way, and all this being said, I’d totally go to a writing conference if invited to participate, or especially if I had some kind of reportorial mission to help me feel like I wasn’t just straight-up schmoozing, something I’ve never been able to do ‘effectively.’

In the meantime, with all the conference-related tweetage I’ve seen from colleagues lately, I thought I’d ask Trish Miller of Travel Writers Exchange to help line out a few quick things about writing conferences and how they pertain to travel writers.

[DM] How important is it for travel writers to attend conferences?

[TM] I definitely think that travel writers of all levels can benefit from writers conferences, but there are only a few that are really geared for “travel” writers. The key factor is ‘what is the mix of educational content’ – which ideally should include both the print and online media – some writers conferences are only just starting to include information on digital media and aren’t very strong yet. Primarily because they are put on by old dinosaurs of the travel writing world.

What can you actually accomplish at a writing conference?

The educational tracks will typically vary, but generally include a combination of panel discussions on both traditional and new (digital) media, and lecture style sessions featuring editors of print pubs and some large online pubs giving advice on how to get published.

One thing they don’t do is cover the very basics – they pretty much assume that if you’re there, you’re already a travel writer and just looking to find new markets, meet editors and publishers, network, and maybe pick up some new tips and tricks

What is the most relevant conference for aspiring travel writers to attend?

Book Passage Travel Writers Conference is one of the oldest and still probably the best to attend, but their Digital Media track was not as in-depth as I’d hoped it would be. I realize that it’s a new area for them, as they’ve been heavily into teaching for print pubs and book authoring, and some travel photography, until this year. So maybe next year they will expand this track.

They did have a great lineup of very high-level award-winning editors, publishers, photographers, and literary agents on their faculty who went above and beyond with spending one-on-one time with attendees – very valuable.

I’ve been to a couple of other travel writers conferences, but they are all smaller than BP in terms of attendees, faculty, and sessions. There is one here in Scottsdale AZ this week that I’ve attended in the past, but am skipping this year. Too small, too expensive, not worth the investment of time or money.

I do recommend any writers conference – not just travel writers conferences – if someone is just starting out, especially if they can find a small local conference and avoid travel expenses, as they’ll get a lot out of it, but more experienced writers would be better served to attend something that actually teaches them how to transition to digital media and learn how to effectively use social networking. That is still somewhat lacking in writer’s conferences, but well covered in other conferences like BlogWorld Expo (which I’m going to this week) and PubCon.

Community Connection

What do you think about writing conferences? What positive (or negative) experiences have you had? Am I totally ‘off’ with my ‘food service by sysco’ preconception? Please share with us in the comments below.

Photo Scrunchleface

I had the pleasure of filming and editing videos for Black Rock TV, a new burning man “news and events” video series. I walked out of the desert with hours of footage and after a month I have some great videos to show for it. Please check out Black Rock TV.com and show some love!

I would love to hear what you think of the videos.

Check out more vids at www.blackrocktv.com

Community Connection

Matador has Burning Man covered! BNT’s Best Of The Week: Burning Man Roundup, 5 Things Cities Can Learn From Burning Man, One Week in The Desert: a Burning Man Documentary.

Photo: SashaW

Last week we put out a call for Micro Notes.

The goal was to tell a complete travel story–something with character, setting, chronology, and ideally, some kind of transformation–in three sentences or less.

A couple of interesting patterns occurred to me as I read through the submissions:

1. The more writers tried to set up a context or provide background information, the more it worked against the overall effect / power of the story. In three sentences there just wasn’t space.

2. The most effective writing read like Twitter updates. They seemed to assume you as the reader already knew everything, and so the writer needed only to remind him or herself of what was happening or what had happened. They took one particular moment in time and place and reported on it without trying to make it more than it was. Which of course, gives it a chance to be more than it was.

Overall, dozens of people submitted their work. Big ups to everyone who sent something. These were our favorites:

Maya Marie Weeks

In Reykjavik I did much the same as in Grass Valley: walked the streets like a local without a car, drinking coffee, avoiding stepping in dog shit. Space is relative, but the thing about Iceland is the island’s crooked horizon. Not a single one of my pictures turned out.

Alex Blackwelder

I loved China until a married man bit my ear on a train three hours south of Beijing. He told me he loved me, but I pretended to not understand. After he left a kind woman boarded and held me until I loved China again.

Susan Marjanovic

Sitting on an old Carolina porch under wind chimes made from old doorknobs & faucets, playing a tiny toy piano trying to capture the sound of my contentment. Today I planted zucchini seedlings.

Audrey Medina

The four of us spent the morning in pajamas, casting home-tied flies onto the shimmering, duckless expanse of Duck Lake. Hidden among the ponderosas beneath a ridge of Sierran granite, our little tents smelled of fried brook trout, wet dogs, and bourbon spilt from plastic flasks. On the trek back down the mountain, we passed a rusted iron sign that read “Duck Lake 2.0 M;” its pointy end leaning toward a previously overlooked fork in the trail.

Community Connection

Have micro-notes you’d like to submit? Please send them to david [at] matadornetwork.com. We’ll be rounding these up and publishing our favorites ever 1-2 weeks.

Photo papalars

The thought of Dustin and I ascending moonlit scree slopes occupies my mind during the 4-hour drive from Seattle to Mt. St. Helens. I was born the year after Helens blew its top. Just missed it.

When I was a kid the eruption held a sense of monumental awe that folks just couldn’t shake. Every year around the anniversary Old Man Burtchett would point over the ridge of Douglas firs where the ash rose up and circled the earth. He heard it boom.

Who proposed to climb to the rim of the crater in the dead of night, I can’t remember. Dusty had made the relatively easy climb the summer before with no snow and no problems. But now it was February and we had snow shoes and poles if not our best interest in mind.

1:30am. We set off past the fleet of RV’s that hum gently with sleeping snowmobilers. After a few miles the trees break and the face of the volcano begins to pitch upward. Deep gullies slope away and great valleys open up to our headlamps.

Ridges of rock in sporadic slashes. The wind starts to shove. Left then right then up from behind into all the little chinks in my clothing. We hug the ridge now because 5 feet on either side is a sheer drop.

Now the angle of our ascent blocks all view of what lies ahead. It’s all just up. It’s all just dark. In the Big Drop Off little trees grow at absurd drunken angles. My light doesn’t reach the bottom. I have my concerns. I keep thinking that we are going to step right off the edge of the world and not know it. It is all up up up until bang, you’re there, but you don’t see it coming. At least that is what I heard.

I insist we hunker behind a slab of rock and make coco. There is a shy smear of gray to the east, just behind Mt. Adams and I want to sip coco as the sun comes up.

The summit is a tempest. The mountain levels off and then you realize you are standing on a 20 foot cornice that hangs off the edge of the crater. The wind sprays ice. I am so shaken by the wind speeds, the cold and the fact that I am literally hovering about a smoldering lava dome that my footage is scant at best.

Dustin and I crawl to the edge of the volcano like little boys and peer over.

Community Connection

Ever climbed a mountain before? Wanna try… 6 American Mountains to Climb for Big Adventure & 11 Most Dangerous Mountains in the World for Climbers

Cristóbal Colón

Leave it to Twitter to make you feel ‘ambient awareness’ on Columbus Day. I keep thinking of my crew in Colorado. Denver always has a good old fashioned drumbeating protest against Cristóbal Colón. Segundo told me about it one year, said ‘you’re down down there just jamming. Then you look up at a streetcorner and see these cameras filming you.”

Where did “Columbus” come from anyway? What’s the etymology of that one? And why didn’t we just learn his real name–Cristóbal Colón? Colón as in colon-ization?

Looking for answers today so I thought I’d just track Twitter for a little while. Then the idea to begin copying / pasting. By the time I’d do a search, copy and paste something that seemed relevant or ‘engaging’ or ‘weak-ass to the point of being able to be used ironically’, then go back and search again, there would already be between 20-200 more updates. It was like fishing in a fast and very polluted river, your hook baited with Chicken McNuggets. I could only take it for 16 minutes.

As always I just wanted some kind of voice / place / story / character. Most of it, predictably, was just marketing, but not all:

Tweets on “columbus day”

@homegrownian: We’re making salmon breakfast sandwiches on indigenous heirloom Makah Potato demi baguettes in honor of not celebrating Columbus day

@eccehomo84 “They Came Through the Islands.” Pablo Neruda. Canto General on Columbus Day.

@OHSSpanish1 10.12.09 ¡Feliz día de la Raza! In Spanish-speaking countries, Columbus Day is celebrated as the Day of the (Hispanic)Race.

@IshFish is celebrating columbus day by eating, facebook, and watching movies…thank you Columbus for making this possible…

@TAMartinsen Columbus day just screwed me over.

@thekatinthehat aghhh I need to go shopping and I need a haircut . oh greaaat – it. Columbus day. everything is closed so we are left with nothing to do. ):

@bretta75 Cracking up over a friend’s rant about how Columbus Day should not be a recognized holiday! Lol.

@pmoallemian My deep sympathies to survivors of one of the largest acts of genocide on this planet on the day to honor the victims aka the Columbus Day.

@vtsheen Costco is packed like a Saturday. The world must be off celebrating Columbus Day, I thought our economy was crappy!?

@gletham What am I supposed to do on Columbus day? Feels like any other day…

@sockonafish “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.” Happy Columbus Day!

@Maxbp To the PC police: “Happy Columbus Day!” That’s right I said Columbus. War, conquest, slavery all existed in America before he arrived.

@dbsalk Read the first chapters of James Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and then try to tell me that we should celebrate Columbus Day.

@writingvixen Happy Columbus Day! Leave it to America to celebrate a day honoring how men just won’t stop and ask for directions.

@kahpang Columbus Day is such a joke… how can you “discover” a land when there are already people living there?

@dahveed_miller Columbus Day: a woman at the park was feeding her infant Chicken McNuggets.

@surfingdairy Looking for something fun to do with the kids on Columbus Day? We’re open!

Community Connection

Big up native peoples worldwide. What do you think of Columbus Day?

Photo anyjazz65

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is-full of surprises.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer

A plot is nothing but a normal human situation that keeps arising again and again….normal human emotions—envy, ambition, rivalry, love, hate, greed, and so on.
-Louis L’Amour

Plot-driven commercial fiction needs to have large stakes, something that’s a threat to the lead character from the outside.
-James Scott Bell

A woman never remembers the pain of childbirth and a writer never remembers his plots.
-James M. Cain

I think plots are made up of strings of events, elaborated by description and dialogue.
-Stuart Wood

A plot isn’t merely a string of occurrences; it is a carefully orchestrated telling of events that might include breaking up their temporal order, taking out certain pieces or emphasizing other pieces. It is that manipulation that a simple story becomes a plot.
-Robert Kernen

Since a novel is a recreation of reality, its theme has to be dramatized, i.e., presented in terms of action….A story in which nothing happens is not a story. A story whose events are haphazard and accidental is either an inept conglomeration or, at best, a chronicle, a memoir, a reportorial recording, not a novel….It is realism that demands a plot structure in a novel.
-Ayn Rand

I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all of our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible.
-Stephen King

Know the story—as much of the story as you can possibly know, if not the whole story—before you commit yourself to the first paragraph….If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you?
-John Irving

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story — a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
-Eric Hoffer

If life is just a stage, then we are all running around ad-libbing, with absolutely no clue what the plot is. Maybe that’s why we don’t know whether it’s a comedy or tragedy.
-Bill Watterson

My life has a superb cast but I can’t figure out the plot.
-Ashleigh Brilliant

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
-Anais Nin

Yes, it was promoted to the hilt—for more than a year crammed down our throats by the likes of GM and Bank of America (whose interests may not be entirely altruistic). Yes, there are the overly-precious voiceovers, the numbingly slow trademark pans across sepia-toned still photos, the unabashed nature porn, the incessant, cloying soundtrack of fiddles and banjos.

But here, to our surprise, the writer Dayton Duncan has done a fine job pulling together the intricate and eminently dramatic story of how, against the tide, this most radical notion came to be—the idea of setting aside parts of the country as national parks, owned by We The People—for the benefit not just of Americans but of the whole world.

It’s a hell of a story. And for the following six reasons (and more) it’s one worth hearing, again and again:

1. Because “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread.” (John Muir)

2. Because “Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs all other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

3. Because “The great curse of this age and of the American people is its materialistic tendency. Money, money is the cry everywhere, until our people are held up to the world as noted for nothing except the acquisition of money at the expense of all aesthetic taste and of all love of nature.” (Senator George Vest, MO, 1883)

4. Because “Unless steps are taken by government to withhold them from the grasp of individuals, all places favorable in scenery to the recreation of the mind and body will be closed against the great body of the people.” (Frederick Law Olmsted)

5. Because “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” (John Muir)

6. And because we may have lost track (again), somewhere along the way.

Where to see it?

Alas, the full episodes are no longer available online. But you can still see clips, deleted scenes, and untold stories at pbs. org. You can buy the whole series and other fun national parks/PBS schwag here. You can get both video and audio on iTunes, put it on your Netflix queue, or just check your local library.

Community Connection

For more Matador on parks worldwide, check David DeFranza’s Back to Nature: 13 of the World’s Richest National Parks, or Alan Velasco’s stunning Photo Essay on Glacier.

Been to a National Park lately? How are we doing? Are we living up to the dream? Share your thoughts below…