THIS IS basically an open question for Matador community members, as well as prospective members, including bloggers, writers, filmmakers, and photographers.

Our current terms of service provide copyright protection to anyone who posts content to Matador. This basically means that once you post something at Matador it’s illegal for someone else to re-post, reprint, or in any other way re-publish your work outside of Matador (although you as the author are free to republish it anywhere you want).

This policy, however, goes against a philosophy we believe in, mainly that online publishing and the communities that support online publishing should be based on transparency and set up in such a way as to, in CC’s words, “increase sharing and improve collaboration.”

The upside to having your content available via CC is that other blogs and websites would be able to republish your work, providing you with more links and an increased footprint on the web.

Our fear however, is that writers, photographers, and others who do not want their content to be shared, would not continue to participate actively in our community.

With all of this in mind, please take a second to help us know what you think:

Thanks for taking the time to let us know your thoughts. We invite you to further explain (if necessary) your ideas in the comments below.

Cover of the same travel journal I’ve had since 5/9/08. Address on front: Rauli 596 entre argomedo y santa isabela, my friend Gustavo’s old apartment in Santiago, and the first place we stayed after coming to South America almost 2 years later.

I DON’T KNOW how much of an audience there is for this, but if I could I’d just publish excerpts and pages from people’s travel notebooks here every day. On certain levels that would be my ultimate vision for the Traveler’s Notebook. I have several reasons for this, but really they’re all just extensions of a need for transparency in writing about travel and place. I feel like people’s raw journals reveal perceptions and truths that oftentimes get obscured or diluted when they go to “flesh them out” into an article. I think this has to do both with people’s expectations as far as what seems “publishable,” as well as fear about letting people know what they really think.

The Longest Running Travel Notebook I’ve Ever Had

Below are various excerpts from a journal that has particular meaning for me. I started it in May of 2008 when we lived in Seattle. The very first entry was written at Elwha River campground after the first night of camping with my daughter Layla. I later remixed it into a blog at Matador.

Since then I’ve filled other journals, but for some reason keep coming back to this one, using it for everything: cut lists for carpentry projects, telephone numbers, directions to surf spots, maps of rivers, little notes of what people say, sketches of ideas for cabins, Layla’s crayon scribbles. I let it all mix together and don’t really worry about it. This is how I work:

Colorado (War, 9,200 ft.) by the numbers

# of days spent – 30
# of days snowboarded (in July) – 3
# of hitchhikers picked up along peak to peak Hwy – 4
# of times picked up while hitchiking – 2
# of feet of elevation – 9,200
# of miles you have to hike from there to go snowboarding – 4
# of times bear got into people’s cooler’s, trucks, food – 6
# of times bear ripped lock of trailer door – 1
# of times bear ripped entire door and frame off trailer – 1
# of lag screws used to fix / reinforce -4

Notes taken in Marietta, Georgia on 8/5/09 [with Layla's crayon scribble at bottom]:

“When he was a kid his daddy and preacher just sat him down and explained things to him, and he swallowed the worm and just pulled the whole bobber underwater.”

–Will on a kid’s Christianity

“Flow Chart of Distracted [originally "Divergent" but struck through] Thinking. A chart with three columns designed to represent textually how my mom and I communicate sometimes:

[(a) dialogue, (b) internal thought, (c) internal reaction to internal thought] and the text: “We’re going to a 50th wedding anniversary tonight. This couple’s kids live all over ¹ but they’re all in town this weekend…1. they probably couldn’t stand their parents → 2. no, don’t think like that.

Map of “La Confluencia,” drawn by Omar the day before I paddled the Rio Azul for the first time.

Notes written on 10/26/09 in Florida in a moment of total depression.

A deadness now. In the words mainly. Waiting for them to come back. Flipping back through this journal and realizing how much travel makes the words flow. Something about movement, leaving and arriving. None of this sounds right though. None of it expresses exactly where ‘we’re at’ right now. Someone just commented on my last blog if i’d read the “summer of black widows.” What summer has this been? Summer of bears. Summer of Japhy’s 13th birthday. Summer of the old crews getting back together in Colorado. Now it’s fall. It’s all flowed together like always. It’s been the worst fall of my life so far. The worst fall of Lau’s life. Fall of ultrasounds with no heartbeat. Fall of miscarriages. Fall of swollen knuckles. Fall of Vodka and Cranberry. Fall of getting Mom’s Infiniti up to 50 miles an hour around a curve in the neighborhood while wife and child are screaming in the car. Fall. Fall. Fall. Fall. Fall. Fall. The other night it was bad but then we had nothing left and so just walked around Siesta Key all empty. The sun had gone down and for a while we lay on the beach looking at clouds in the moonlight. When you see what speed they’re moving across the sky and feel like maybe you’re moving that speed too, it brings back that travel feeling like everything is alright again for a little while.

Sketch of cabin idea when it occurred to me to have two different lofts interconnected by a bridge. Drawn in Jan 2010.

Final note: my latest entry in this journal is a cut-list of fence boards for our land in El Bolson, Patagonia.

community connection

Please check out more of Matador’s journal pages.

If you’re interested in submitting, please email scans of photos resized to 930 pixels wide to david at matadornetwork dot com.

New logo of Periodismo Humano

Cinnaminta

Julie Schwietert showed me this site last week.

Cinnaminta is, in their words:

a free online service which enables you to request your poems, original writing, celebrations, acts of remembrance, prayers, messages or anything else to be read out aloud in places around the world which are special for you but which you cannot easily visit.

What I find most relevant about this site is the seemingly random way people use the requests, not just for readings, or to yodel across a canyon, but to ask for pictures, video, and sounds from particular places. I feel like the whole concept is a new way of exploring people’s relationship to place.

Periodismo Humano

Periodsimo Humano, or “human journalism” is a soon to be launched journalism project from Javier Bauluz, the only Spanish winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The project will be a non-profit org espousing the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its only “guideline.”

Last week they tweeted “why do you want a human journalism?” and then remixed the responses into the post Why a Human Journalism? A Post Written by 200 people. Here is an excerpt:

Queremos un periodismo humano porque necesitamos volver a saber por qué quisimos ser periodistas. Porque no nos resignamos. Porque andamos jibarizados a base de siglas y datos. Porque se puede ser responsable, ético, honesto, concienciado y, además, ser feliz. Porque es bueno que se conozca el código fuente de aquellos que nos informan: sus dudas y sus miedos. Porque el periodismo, como la vida, empieza por las cosas pequeñas

Translation: “We want a human journalism because we need to go back to knowing why we wanted to be journalists. Because we didn’t stop believing. Because we don’t go shrinking everything down to dates and abbreviations. Because you can be responsible, ethical, honest, conscientious, and still be happy. Because it’s good to recognize the doubts and fears behind that which informs us.* Because journalism, like life, begins with the little things.”

*not 100% sure of that particular sentence.

This project looks like a major opportunity for Spanish speaking and bilingual journalists wishing to work with a transparent and brilliant community.

Follow them @PmasDH

8 Key Terms for Determining Legitimacy in Journalism

Sarah Menkedick sent me this article last week on determining legitimacy. I really like this post, particularly in the way it rejects the notion that “professionalism” is equivalent to “legitimacy.”

Jay Rosen writes:

These thoughts grew from a comment thread at Nieman Lab. The post in question was titled: The news Good Housekeeping seal: What makes a nonprofit outlet legit? Such things as: adherence to the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics, submitting entries for professional prizes and holding a press credential from a federal or state body were said to be good proxies for legitimacy in journalism. I objected to this:

I don’t think “professionalism” is a feature of legitimacy at all. We could say it’s one way of attempting to secure legitimacy, but the equation: professional news person = legitimate provider of news does not work.

Rosen then gave his 8 key terms, beginning with veracity:

I’d start with the will to veracity, also known as truthtelling. Truthtelling even when it hurts or causes problems for your friends. Real journalists tell us what happened because it actually happened that way, and not some other way. All forms of legitimacy derive from this one.

Follow Jay Rosen: @jayrosen_nyu

National Day of Unplugging

Finally, I saw the national day of unplugging is “scheduled” for later this week. You don’t have to be Jewish to participate.

Community Connection

Please send media / links to david at matadornetwork.com

IT’S BEEN a while since I posted anything “from the editor,” and just wanted to check in for a minute with our readers.

First up, a recent stoke: The Notebook was recently recognized (along with BNT) at Blogs.com as one of 10 Great Travel Writing Blogs.

Next, a quick survey. We have a bunch of things planned here over the next few months, some of which tie into the upcoming launch of MatadorU’s Travel Photography Curriculum, and others that have to do with travel narratives.

In the meantime, I wanted to ask:

Image: RabiD Son

THE ORIGIN of this post began as a comment left at an earlier article, 3 Writing Styles that Kill Your Authenticity .

Basically I was ranting against marketing style language “constructions” as things that (a) obscured the truth, and (b) just “sucked” stylistically, but were nevertheless (c) pervasive, probably as a result of people’s continuous absorption of marketing and advertising via television, radio, computer, movies.

One important point I didn’t make in that article is that the “writing styles” I mentioned are also examples of fallacious arguments, something that writers often miss because many of us (myself included) have never studied rhetoric or logic in school.

Wikipedia’s definition of logical fallacy: writing that

“exploits emotional triggers or takes advantage of social relationships between people.”

So back to the article: one of the constructions that “killed” “authenticity” (using the word “killed,” at least without scare-quotes, is itself a bit fallacious) was the rhetorical question.

I wrote:

.. the narrator asks him or herself a question:

How many people wouldn’t want to live next to a beach like this?

[This] fails because it tries to force the reader into feeling a certain way about the story or question rather than just asking the question or telling the story and letting the reader think / feel for herself.

Then one commenter wrote the following:

#3 sounds a lot like a rhetorical question

Is that really such a writing disaster? I’d like to read more thoughts on this.

I mean, who doesn’t like a rhetorical question?

I wrote back:

Thanks for your question.

Yes, it is essentially a rhetorical question. And the last sentence of your comment illustrates the point exactly.

“I mean, who doesn’t like a rhetorical question?”

Rhetorical questions are constructed in such a way as to point the reader towards a particular answer or response.

For example, the way your sentence above is written implies (a) that you as its author ’speak’ for other people, (b) that this group of people ‘believes’ rhetorical questions are ‘likable’ and (c) this group is the majority–that it’s somehow out of the ordinary to ‘not like’ a rhetorical question.

But you could’ve just as easily written the sentence to work the other way, for example:

“Who hasn’t read enough meaningless rhetorical questions?”

In this case, the sentence is using the same construction, only trying to lead the reader in the opposite direction–to imply that rhetorical questions are somehow ‘not likable.’

Rhetorical questions are one of the classic examples of fallacious arguments or “logical fallacies.”

Today I was reading a recent article at WordHum which seems so full of logical fallacies I remembered this comment and decided to bring up the topic again.

First off, here’s a free resource outlining 89 fallacious arguments.

Now I want to go through several of the statements in the recent WordHum piece, showing how they are examples of logical fallacies.

1. “I doubt if the business, housed in an elegant 16th-century building, could last a month without us. “

This is a form of confusing correlation and causation. Confusing correlations and causation works look this. A person says “1. A occurs in correlation with B., 2. Therefore, A causes B.” This isn’t necessarily true however.

In “all fairness, ” the author’s construction “I doubt if” does mitigate the fallacy somewhat; he’s not “passing it off” as a pure statement of “fact” however, it still seems to be “exploit[ing] emotional triggers or tak[ing] advantage of social relationships between people.”

How could you write that statement non-fallaciously?

“I don’t think they could last a month without us. ”

2. “You know who I mean. Yes, you who wouldn’t be caught dead at Disney World. Or on a Caribbean cruise. Yes, you with the Moleskine notebook and sourpuss expression. You know who you are.”

This is a form of ad hominem known as as hominem abusive. The author is attempting to characterize certain people, however these characterizations are completely irrelevant to the “logic” of his argument. Just because someone has a certain expression or writes in a certain notebook has nothing to do with their “position” on tourism.

How to write that statement non-fallaciously:

I’m not sure if it’s possible.

3. “We tourists provide jobs and, more than that, keep centuries-old traditions alive.”

This is an example of casual reductionism, in which something that is very complex (in this case, the effects of travel on a country’s economy and culture) is reduced to one simple cause / effect relationship.

How to write this non-fallaciously:

“One potential benefit of tourism is helping to ‘fuel’ local tourist economies.”

4. “The moment we step foot in a foreign land we change it irrevocably. We tread heavily, whether we’re wearing sneakers or Birkenstocks. Why not do some good while we’re treading?”

This is an example of two different logical fallacies. The first is Reductive Oversimplification. Is “The moment we step foot in a foreign land we change it irrevocably,” true in all cases? Not necessarily, but it is “passed off” here as truth. Thus it’s fallacious.

The second fallacy is the one I mentioned in the introduction, the fallacy of a rhetorical question. The construction of the question leads you to believe that the argument of “being a tourist” is somehow “doing good.”

There’s probably some other fallacy in there too–something about the relationship set up between the first fallacy (oversimplification) and the second. But I’m not 100% sure.

How to write this non-fallaciously:

“I believe the moment I step into another country I change it irrevocably. ”

“5. The idea is simple: A culture is worth more alive than dead. “

This is the “premise” of the entire story, and the reason why it’s “fundamentally flawed.” This statement is an example of a bad analogy. The author is declaring “culture” analogous with “commodity.”

How to write this non-fallaciously:

attempt 1:

In my albeit conflating “view” of “culture” and “economics,” I believe that “preserving” certain “tourist elements” provides financial “incentives” to local tourist economies greater than the potentially damaging effects vis-a-vis locals’ sense of “decaying morale” as parts of their “cultural heritage” are “subsidized” and possibly “transformed into a spectacle” via the elements’ “continued existence” as “living artifacts,” many of which appear to have “become jokes” among the local people, both “in and of themselves,” and also extrinsically, in the way they provide “entertainment,” especially during the “high season” when large numbers of tourists “flood” the “artifacts” leading to “blowout proportions” of people behaving in ways that appear to be delusions of “massive beneficence” and / or “enlightenment.”

I almost deleted that but will leave it up for you to “parse.”

I’m also aware that this piece is not FFF (free from fallacy), as, rereading it now, I’m detecting possible prestigious jargon and also the “sensation” that the whole thing may be an argument by gibberish.

Still, it seems truer to me than “a culture is worth more alive than dead.”

Community Connection

Please read Sarah Menkedick’s rebuttal of the piece at WorldHum.

Also, BNT has published two pieces on logical fallacies, The Kung Fu Warrior’s Guide to Arguing with Logic, and The Kung Fu Warrior’s Guide to Informal Fallacies.

Getsome.

Image: Pedro Simoes7

Crowdsourcing

Last Friday I had an interesting conversation via Twitter with Jeff Howe.

Jeff is a writer at Wired Magazine and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He coined the term “crowdsourcing,” and wrote a book on the subject last year.

As our team is (a) constantly using this term in our back-end emails, and (b) continuously evolving the way we produce certain kinds of content via crowdsourced information, I’ve really enjoyed getting into Jeff’s blog / perceptions of media / technology. I found this article on The Pitfalls of Citizen Journalism really relevant to Matador, and particular, MatadorU.

I think the crowd make excellent sources and additional sets of eyes and ears, but I believe the future lies in carefully cultivated partnerships between professionals and their audiences. Examples: I’m a huge fan of Talking Points Memo and their TPMMuckraker project, am bullish on my colleague David Cohn’s crowdfunded journalism site, Spot.Us. Both let professionals work the phones and write the copy, but encourage the crowd to do what it does best (unearthing data and marshaling support for underreported stories, respectively)

For some reason I’m unable to fully decide on a position re: “professionals vs. citizens” when it comes to travel writing. Perhaps this is because to me travel writing is more a form of literary expression than a journalistic “endeavor.”

Spot-Us expanding

Last month I reported on the “community funded reporting” project called Spot.us. I was stoked to find this interview with founder David Cohn where he lays out plans to expand Spot.Us to several more cities in the US.

Media as a public subsidy

Another response to the changing economic model for journalism: declaring it a “public good” and subsidizing it by the government. This idea is the basis of a new book by University of Illinois Professor Robert McChesney and The Nation correspondent John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again.

For more information, please read the recent interview with Nichols and McCheney at Democracy Now, part of which is excerpted below:

Robert McChesney:

we think we’re in a moment of crisis right now for journalism, not just the sort of the long-term crisis we often talk about and you chronicle on this program, but really a freefall collapse in which, in the next few years, the decisions we make will determine whether we even have journalism as it’s been known traditionally.

The business model that has supported journalism for the last 125 years in this country is disintegrating. There will be some advertising, but much less. There will be some circulation revenues, but much less. And if we’re going to have journalism in this country, it’s going to require that there be public subsidies to create an independent, uncensored, nonprofit, non-commercial news media sector.

And we argue in the book, as you said, that we actually have a very rich tradition of this. The first hundred years of American history, the founders did not assume the market would give us journalism. There was no such assumption at all. They understood it was the first duty of a democratic state to see that a vibrant, independent, uncensored Fourth Estate exist.

Public Domain Manifesto

From the Public Domain Manifesto:

After decades of measures that have drastically reduced the public domain, typically by extending the terms of protection, it is time to strongly reaffirm how much our societies and economies rely on a vibrant and ever expanding public domain. The role of the public domain, in fact, already crucial in the past, it is even more important today, as the Internet and digital technologies enable us to access, use and re-distribute culture with an ease and a power unforeseeable even just a generation ago. The Public Domain Manifesto aims at reminding citizens and policy-makers of a common wealth that, since it belongs to all, it is often defended by no-one. In a time where we for the first time in history have the tools to enable direct access to most of our shared culture and knowledge it is important that policy makers and citizens strengthen the legal concept that enables free and unrestricted access and reuse.

In a previous mashup I linked to Edge which has interesting essays on the subject of public domain and the “threats of cloud capitalism.”

Community Connection

Please share your thoughts about the future of journalism in the comments below.

Who do you talk to on press trips? Photo: Sergio

MOST press trips are inherently tweaked.

For example, check out the following sentences in a press trip alert I received this morning:

“. . . there is some scope for sponsored participation in our expeditions in conjunction with corporate sponsors, usually if a commission in a well-known medium has been obtained and the sponsor can be given exposure. In that case the airfare, all meals, activities, lodging, and in country transportation are likely to be included. “

I interpret that as meaning “if your shit is big-time enough to adequately pimp us / our sponsors, we’ll pay for you to come.”

Which is the essence of most press trips.

And that’s fine. Any worrying about, romanticizing, or deluding yourself in any way about press trips is a total waste of time. The reality is that they can be positive or negative experiences, depending mostly on your ability to maintain your focus and find a good story.

With that in mind, I wanted to publish an email exchange from last week. This was from an editor in the middle of a press trip, and was answered by Matador CEO Ross Borden. More than anything, it shows the focus necessary when dealing with hosts and “handlers,” especially when you know you have a potentially good story:

turkey project was WEIRD today. an entire day of corporate sales shit and nada on the eco-angle – just men in suits sporting sinister black moustaches and loose-toothed smiles. if you don’t mind i’d like to sack all that crap and interview ken yeong, the malaysian eco-architect don whose vision this is, and whose words would surely be more suited to CHANGE than those of the investment people.

And the response:

dude, TAKE CONTROL from your host. In my experience, a good press trip usually involves strong arming your handler into allowing you to do what you actually want to do / write about / photograph. even if the person is afraid of losing their job over it, calmly explain that you’re going to scrap the rest of ‘today’s itinerary’, and wander around the city / markets snapping sick photos for a photo essay for MatadorTrips.com, and while you’re doing that, they should set up an interview with homeboy.

seriously, drop the hammer and don’t take no for an answer.

Community Connection

Most of us at Matador have been on multiple press trips. We teach how to apply for them at the U. And over the past couple years we’ve published various articles about them, everything from tips on how to “survive” your first press trip, to the way that certain publications’ policies regarding press trips tends to undermine honesty and transparency in journalism.

What experience have you had with press trips? How have you dealt with overbearing hosts?

Please share your comments with us below.

Image: | spoon |

THIS WEEKEND in a hostel in Futalefu, Chile I found one of my all-time favorite books, Cathedral, by Raymond Carver.

I’ve read the stories in this book probably half a dozen times each and still keep finding new layers.

Yesterday I noticed this passage in the story “Careful.”

As a quick set-up: the protagonist Lloyd is separated from his wife Inez, and has moved into a cheap attic apartment where he lives by himself and tries to deal with his drinking problem. After not having seen each other for a long time, Inez comes to visit.

“Hi, Lloyd,” Inez said. She didn’t smile. She stood in the doorway in a bright spring outfit. He hadn’t seen the outfit before. She was holding a canvas handbag that had sunflowers stitched onto its sides. He hadn’t seen the handbag either.”

As I read and then reread this passage I realized something about the way I usually write descriptions and the way most other writers write descriptions, and how this description of Inez was different: it reveals not only what the narrator saw but how he saw it.

Remember that he hasn’t seen his wife in a long time. Then notice the order of what he sees: (a) her face [and the fact she wasn't smiling], (b) her outfit, [noting that it's an outfit he hadn't seen before], and then (c) a new handbag.

Most writers seem to describe scenes and people in a way that seems just that–descriptions. For example, they might describe the scene listed above as: “She stood in the doorway wearing a spring dress and holding a handbag. She wasn’t smiling.”

There’s nothing “wrong” with that description, but it doesn’t convey much about the way the narrator sees this character. It says, essentially, that he sees her as just a woman standing in the doorway without smiling.

Compare this with all the unstated emotions conveyed through the way Carver ordered his descriptions of Inez. The first thing he notices: “She wasn’t smiling.” This implies that he may have hoped she would be smiling, or perhaps he’s simply resigned that she isn’t happy to see him. However you interpret it, what matters is that the first thing he noticed was her face.

After that, “she stood in the doorway.” She doesn’t just walk in. This implies various things about where they are in their relationship. He scans her body, notices that she’s wearing something new. Then his eye goes to her bag and he notices that’s new too. All of this continues to add a sense of distance between them. They’re no longer sharing the same experiences.

As I wrote last month about how Raymond Carver’s work wasn’t so much an “expression” but something remixed over and over with editor Gordon Lish until every detail was just right: there’s nothing accidental about any of these lines or how they’re ordered. Each one is constructed in a way that gives the maximum amount of information about who the characters are, what the relationship is between them, and how they see the world.

No matter what kind of writing you’re doing, whether it’s travel narratives or straight up journalism, learning how to describe beyond what just you can “see” (such as the relationships between characters), is another way to progress as a writer.

Community Connection

Sometimes even before writing it helps just to work on your observation skills.

THE IDEA for this post came from a question at Matador’s forums earlier this week. A discussion was raised about how to migrate your blog from Blogger to WordPress without losing content.

Below are a couple resources that show you how to do this, and then after that is a bit more on why I think this is worth doing. Earlier this year I wrote a very general overview on Which Blogging Platform is Best for Writers , and I still think it’s valid, however, after looking at a few more things about SEO and “ranking” (which I’ll explain below), I’ve changed my mind somewhat about Blogger.

How to switch

WordPress has an easy to follow page that explains how to import content from Blogger (or other platforms) to WP.

Or you can watch this video:

@Sosauce

@cerusso

@familyonbikes

@Shurleyhall

@joanna_haugen

@karenbryan

@20stravel

@evenyc

@dahveed_miller

@waywardlife

Matador Tweeps

Follow the Matador Staff on Twitter! @rossborden, @LolaAkinmade, @dahveed_miller ,@tcpatterson, @ianmack, @livingholistic, @waywardlife, @collazoprojects, @joanna_haugen, @vagab0nderz, @sarahmenkedick, @halamen, @joshywashington, @thefutureisred, @candicewalsh, @andrewghayes

Community Connection

Feel like you want to have your face and twittering featured here sometime in the future?

RT a message to @matadornetwork

Photo: ekai

IT’S BEEN hard getting books in Patagonia. English selections in local bookstores are weak (although I did find 5 Major Plays by Chekhov).

Over the past month though I’ve made this progression. I’ve ‘crossed a line.’

Before I never used to take the computer into bed. Something about working on that mofo all day and then bringing it into bed and falling asleep with it on your chest just seems anti-life or something.

But whatever. I need to read to fall asleep. I’ve gotten used to it now. It works pretty much the same as paper.

Once you ‘get here’ it opens up everything as far as reading. (I realize of course everyone with a kindle or ipad or whatever is ‘already here’ but I just can’t afford and don’t want to buy more shit.)

ReadPrint

The first real site I’ve gotten to love is ReadPrint.com. It’s free and has a good layout and plenty of Dostoevsky and Joyce and Chekhov and Cather and most of the classics.

The one catch is that they don’t have any books you’d consider modern classics (Camus, Sartre, Carver, or even Baudelaire). It’s all from 100 years ago or more.

Still, there are quotes from nearly every major author you can think of, past and present. In that way it’s a major resource.

52 Stories

I’ve been getting into fiftytwostories. It’s a site from Harper Perennial that publishes one free story each week. I was led to this site because they published the story “Tennessee” from Justin Taylor’s new book Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever.

Fiction and Nonfiction

I realize most of the reading I’ve listed so far is fiction. There’s a reason for this: I like most fiction better than I do most nonfiction.

What I seem to be attracted to most of all though is work that’s at the intersection of fiction and nonfiction. Most of Hunter S. Thompson’s books, for example. Kerouac. Bukowski.

A recent article at Utne talks about how this intersection of fiction and nonfiction is progressing, citing Dave Eggers and others. A good read.

Musician’s Notebooks

Like poetry, personal journals seem to be outside of fiction and nonfiction somehow. Sometimes I feel like writing never intended for publication is more transparent than anything else.

Anyway, I found these ‘notebook pages’ from musicians at Largehearted Boy. Some interesting stuff so far; I liked the one from Julian Koster of the Music Tapes.

Only thing is, they seem to read as if they were intended for publication–more like essays than actual journal pages.

2 Tools for Writers / Bloggers

I installed and started using apture on my blog. It’s sweet. Basically any word(s) you want to link to–you plug that into a quick search–and then apture automatically searches dozens of different sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, and others for relevant links which you can either choose to link to or embed in your post. What’s really cool though is that even if you just link them, the link comes up in a mini-preview screen so that the reader doesn’t actually leave your blog. For an example, check my blog here and then click on any of the links. Really simple.

Another tool that I’m just starting to use is compfight. It’s basically a faster way to swoop Creative Commons images than going through Flickr or GoogleCommons. I used it to get the feature image for this post.

Using Where You Live to Advance Your Writing Career

Julie Schwietert wrote a really transparent piece about how where you live as the starting point for your writing. Great advice in there.

Have a great week everyone, and please hit me up with any Monday Mashup links or sites you’re feeling and which might be worth recommending to other travelers, writers, and bloggers. Bigup.

Image: carrotcreative

@Fictonaut

Online literary community for “adventurous readers & writers.” Fictionaut editors tweet dozens of times a day on various stories, interviews, plus publishing and job opportunities.

@SpotUS

Spot.Us is a nonprofit organization supporting independent journalists in the Bay Area and Los Angeles through community funded reporting.

@mediabistro

Key resource for writer, journalists, and new media professionals.

@htmlgiant

HTML GIANT tweets mostly bigs up their own stories but definitely check them out.

@sixsentences

6S is a friendly and supportive community for writers based around a 6-sentence form. Occasional tweets on writing opportunities and links to good interviews / articles.

@matadornetwork

For those unfamiliar with us, Matador is the most-read independent travel publication on the web. We have a worldwide community of travel writers, photographers, and filmmakers.

Community Connection

What writing communities do you participate in or follow via Twitter?

Matadorian Beija-Flor with street kids in Brazil. There are all different kinds of travel.

FOR ME the relevant question is never why but when, followed closely by where.

You think about why you do something, maybe write that reason down, but then when you look at it a year later–or maybe 5 years later-at some point you’re going to change the way you feel about it. There was the “why” you did it then and the “why” you’d do it (or not do it) now.

Your answer to the question why is like a little bookmark of the way you thought and felt about something at a specific moment in your life. And in some ways this seems more important than the actual answer itself.

This is my thinking anyway after spending a while collecting various Matadorians’ answers to the question “Why do you travel?” Some of the answers seem ‘wise’ or ‘earnest’ but mainly they just make me stoked on the people who said them.

Beija-Flor

As the world is my home, I need to feel at home.

Mike Lynch

To keep away from home.

SweeneySays

Because I feel most at home when I am in motion.

Matt Scott

There just too much great stuff to see

Beer and Beans

To see the way light falls in other parts of the world.

Jess Vulcan

Because I don’t like owning silverware.

Nancy Harder

Because I truly believe that travel is art. We have the ability to create masterpieces with our experiences.

Sarah Menkedick

To avoid falling into patterns and only seeing the obvious things from an ingrained personal perspective.

A Literal Girl

To try to understand how we experience place.

Julie Schwietert

To know myself better and to know the world better.

Candice Walsh

To learn, to explore, to meet new people, to find what the hell I’m looking for.

Neha

To look for all those stories waiting to be found.

LeighShulman

It keeps me from taking things for granted.

Gregory Hubbs

To learn from other human beings and experience the world in new ways.

Lola Akinmade

To be a cultural ambassador as well as soak up the wisdom of other cultures.

Hal Amen

I’m not sure…but I can’t stop!

Community Connection

Why do you travel? Please share your answer with us in the comments below.

Mashup: Cambodia 4 kids

Alexa Toolbar

For the past couple months I’ve had the Alexa toolbar installed on my computer. On one level it’s a powerful tool for anyone looking to get ad revenue for their blogs or who is networking via social media to expand their audience.

That said, the Alexa toolbar can fundamentally change the way you work on the internet and perhaps even the way you ‘deal’ with people. Basically, the toolbar shows a numerical ranking of every page you visit. It’s all based on traffic. Google is #1. Your brother’s law office website is #23,308,088.

Suddenly you start feeling sorry for people’s blogs. You visit a page like the American Poetry Review and wonder how your relatively crappy blog has a higher rank.

As an example of the effect of Alexa rankings, I’m going to add today’s Alexa rank to the rest of the items listed in this article.

Trueslant

Alexa Rank: #12,219

Trueslant is a privately held company funded by Forbes Media. They are, in their own words:

“an original content news network tailored to both the “Entrepreneurial Journalist” and marketers who want a more effective way to engage with digital audiences. Contributors, consumers and marketers each have a voice on True/Slant.

True/Slant is the digital home for the “Entrepreneurial Journalist.” Knowledgeable and credible contributors anchor and build their digital brands on True/Slant using tools that enable them to easily create content and craft stories filtered through human perspective (not an algorithm).

Consumers have direct access to contributors they respect and follow. By commenting with contributors and each other, they create an authentic and ongoing dialogue around the news.”

I feel slightly alienated at being categorized directly as a consumer although perhaps I should respect the transparent way the editors / publishers are describing their target audience and accept that the word “reader” is becoming more euphemistic than anything else.

This said, I like the structure of trueslant. It’s a lot like Matador in the sense of community building. I see trueslant as a potential option for many of our contributors looking to connect with networks of political writers.

ommwriter

Alexa Rank: #59,491

Last monday I talked about listening to music while writing. Afterward, I thought more about the idea of distractedness and its effect on how I work. I found this writing software OmmWriter. It’s basically a simple text editor with a very clean and minimalist interface designed to mimic the “close relationship of pen and paper.”

The Nervous Breakdown

Alexa Rank: #330,985

Following up on a story on 2 Transparent Responses to Current Economic ‘Climate’ for Writers, I found this “self-interview” by Stephen Elliot on his D.I.Y. booktour.

My favorite “question” was this:

So you didn’t hook up?

I made out with a woman in Ft. Lauderdale. I don’t generally hook up with people when I first meet them. And also, when you’re on the road, I don’t know, it’s kind of awkward. What I long for when I travel isn’t sex, it’s intimacy. I don’t know if you can have intimacy with someone you just met. Why are we talking about this?

I like the Nervous Breakdown. They seem transparent. They have a section on “Flash Nonfiction” with writing that focuses sometimes on travel and place.

Pamela

Alexa Rank: #65, 956

My original system for recording phone interviews was putting calls on speakerphone and then recording them on a digital voice recorder. It sucked. Lately, I’ve been using Skype more and more, and just saw Pamela, an add-on for Skype that enables you to record calls as audio or video files. I can’t imagine a more useful tool for journalists, travel writers, and filmmakers. Download is free is you get up to 15 minutes of recording.

Edge

Alexa Rank: #50,230

Edge is good for reading when you start to have thoughts like “Damn, we’re all just Google’s ‘bitches’.” With all the positive effects that new media and the internet have created (such as being able to make a living typing this on a windy morning in Patagonia), we’re often so ‘heads-down’ in it that it’s hard (read: scary) to stop and question its trajectory vis a vis “cloud capitalism.”

From the Edge:

..A third threat comes from the new media moguls, the cloud capitalists: Facebook, Apple, Google, Salesforce, Twitter, who will seek to make money by creating and managing clouds for us.

These cloud capitalists are the new powers behind global cultural relations. Their rise has sparked an increasingly vicious civil war with the media old guard led by Rupert Murdoch. This battle between old and new media powers however has distracted attention from the question of how these companies will organise cloud culture on our behalf. Elements of their business models resemble traditional public services: Google’s work with a consortium of libraries around the world to digitise books that are out of copyright; ITunes U provides thousands of models of course material for free. However these companies are also businesses: they will want to organise the cloud to make money. By the end of the decade Google will have unprecedented control over literary culture, past, present and future.

Community Connection

Are you reading something, or have recently discovered something that might be useful to other writers, travelers, or new media professionals? Please send it to david [at] matadornetwork[dot]com with “Monday Mashup” in the subject line.

Photo: Very Quiet

WHILE I’M TRAVELING I can listen to any kind of music and still write.

When I lived in Buenos Aires for example, I used to write in buses playing all different music. 80s Depeche Mode type of stuff to Rock Nacional to cumbia. It didn’t matter. I could keep my head down and write.

But for some reason when I’m at home writing it always matters. It completely matters. When I’m writing at home certain music just seems to shut down my concentration. Unfortunately I can’t reduce it to simple categories like “music without lyrics” or even specific genres like “breaks” because there’s always exceptions of what’s “allowable,” even within sub-genres.

For example, I can write while listening to certain reggae music, say raggamuffin-sounding stuff by Damien Marley, but it can’t be any of the pre Jam Rock-era Damien Marley. If not I’ll end up thinking something like “damn those cheesy synth tones; what were the producers thinking?” and the flow is broken.

In general though what seems to work is music that either keeps “pushing forward” (like straight-up house or drum and bass ) or sort of “billows out” like a lot of Charles Mingus tunes or most dub (Lee Perry, King Tubby) as well as most ambient. If something can be characterized as “ultra-smooth” it probably works. Jobim, for example. Most Bosa Nova.

But then I can’t listen to most funk (which is the root of “pushing forward”) unless it’s like an instrumental track from the JB’s. In a similar way I can’t listen to anything “classic” from high-school / college days such as Blood Sugar Sex Magic-era Chili Peppers or Neutral Milk Hotel or Pixies, Radiohead, Sublime, or R.E.M.

Most hip hop doesn’t work either. I end up trying to “get on the mic” or something, deconstructing the lyrics and typing in the same bpm as the track.

And there are certain kinds of music that never work. Any “high lonesome sound” bluegrass like the Stanley Brothers. Anything I first heard as a little kid from dad’s record collection like Hank Williams. Anything by Billie Holliday or Edith Piaf or Patsy Cline.

Finally, there’s the “x-factor,” which overrides everything.This is when I’m in that mode where I don’t really care about what I’m writing but the words just come out. Which ties back in to my original observation–that when I’m traveling it doesn’t matter what music is playing, I just write.

Something about this seems important. It seems like a transparent action versus a form of OD’ing on self-consciousness. For example, yesterday we had a great email thread about a producer in Buenos Aires who needed connections. This led to me passing along links about digital cumba collective Zizek and then, as I kept working, listening to one of their recent mixtapes. It was all a flow that felt really spontaneous and real.

But then I started writing some paragraphs for a book proposal, and the cumbia was just shutting me down. I started feeling like what I was writing was less like a natural flow / creation and something I was totally forcing. I took off my headphones and finished it with no music.

These are the kind of things I think about. I think about how I write and how different people write. Not just the writing itself but the way we do it. I want to know, for example, what Jon Favreau (27 yr. old speechwriter for Obama) listens to (if anything) when he writes President Obama’s speeches. Could he have, for example, composed certain emotive parts of the President’s Inaugural address while listening to GirlTalk or perhaps Li’l Wayne?

I’m not sure I have any real conclusions here. It always seems to come down to just you and the words and however you can get them down. I feel like I need to follow up on this next week with more data and thought. So let’s end it with you:

Community Connection

Thanks for voting in the poll and leaving your favorite music to write to (or what makes it harder) in the comments below. ]]> http://thetravelersnotebook.com/notes-on-writing/what-music-do-you-listen-to-when-you-write-poll/feed/ 36 http://thetravelersnotebook.com/writing-support/how-to-craft-a-writing-resume/ http://thetravelersnotebook.com/writing-support/how-to-craft-a-writing-resume/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:20:20 +0000 David Miller http://thetravelersnotebook.com/?p=7427 For writers, especially beginning writers without a long publication record, putting together a CV or resume for a writing job can seem tricky and perhaps depressing. Here’s how to make yourself look good.

Image: juhansonin

EARLIER THIS WEEK I needed to put together either a resume or CV (Curriculum Vitae) for review by a university.

I hadn’t updated my resume in at least 6 years and basically created a new one. Perhaps because I wasn’t under pressure of having to use this for getting a job, I found the process of creating it strangely gratifying. It almost seemed like editing a story.

Here were some things I learned:

1.Utilize a CV format instead of a resume.

The standard resume format forces you to begin with your employment or professional history, starting with the last thing you did. I could never keep track of the exact start / finish dates of all the different gigs I had. And I always hated how it felt like I needed to ‘cover’ various gaps of time where I was basically traveling or surfing or whatever.

Think about it from the point of view of the person reading the resume. This is the first thing they come to after your name and personal info: the last thing you did was work for 6 months as a parking lot attendant at a large corporate ski resort where your “ending salary” was $8.75.

Perhaps even worse is beginning with an “objective statement” explicating how you’re the “perfect candidate” because of cliches x, y, and z.

The CV format saves you from all of this because you start with your academic history. At least the first thing the person reads is that you graduated from high school (hopefully), college (better), and that you majored in something that is either relevant to what you’re applying for, or is something you can make seem relevant via the way you present your work experience.

2. Utilize a “Summary of Professional Experience” written in a smooth, almost narrative style.

After listing your academic history, go on to professional experience, but instead of bullet points and dates, write it all out like a story. Show the person reading it that you have skills to put sentences and paragraphs together. A summary also gives you a transparent way of ‘covering’ gaps in employment in a way that seems positive. Take this paragraph from my CV:

After graduating from the University of Georgia in 1995 I spent 5 months hiking the Appalachian trail, then returned to Athens, Georgia where I was hired by the Athens Montessori School as a middle school teacher. I helped innovate an experiential education curriculum for adolescents based on teambuilding and utilizing travel and “place” as springboards for learning. I resigned my full-time teaching position in the summer of 1999 (due to travel), but continued to work as a trip leader and teambuilding facilitator for both the Athens Montessori School and High Meadows School and Camp until relocating to Colorado in 2002.

Notice how there are essentially three years’ worth of employment that are ’skipped over’? It’s not that I wasn’t working; it’s just that I kept traveling and doing various gigs (read: parking lot attendant) that I didn’t want to mention.This isn’t necessarily hiding anything, it’s just that these things aren’t directly relevant to my experience as a writer or educator.

3. Continuously edit each sentence until it contains only what you did and nothing more.

Take another paragraph from my professional experience summary:

In the winter of 2006 I began contributing articles to the newly-founded Matador Travel Network, and later that Spring was hired as editor. Over the next year I worked with hundreds of writers and helped cultivate a supportive community for aspiring writers, photographers, and filmmakers around the world.

In the first draft of this paragraph I’d written “Over the next year I worked with hundreds of writers and helped cultivate what has become known as a supportive community for aspiring writers, photographers, and filmmakers around the world.”

Anything that inserts something essentially subjective or just straight up unnecessary like “what has become known as” is anti-flow. Trying to make something ’sound’ a certain way always comes out sounding false. Just state what you did or are doing, whatever it is.

4. Leave out jobs and experiences that are irrelevant to your writing goals or future career.

Take this paragraph from my summary:

In the fall of 2002 I was hired by Wild Bear Center in Nederland, Colorado as an environmental educator and teambuilding facilitator. At this time I also began working as a freelance writer, contributing to alternative weeklies such as the Flagpole as well as the regional western publication Mountain Gazette. I was hired as a reporter and columnist by the local Nederland paper, The Mountain-Ear in Fall of 2003, and in the Spring of 2004 I also became a staff writer for the Boulder Weekly.

The main things I’m trying to express in this CV are that (a) I have numerous skills and experiences as a writer and (b) I have numerous skills as an educator that tie into the way I write and work with writing students.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter that also in the during the time outlined above I also worked in construction. Or, if I was going for a different kind of job, lets say a technical writer, I would consider putting this information in.

5. Include only your most relevant publications and awards.

After the summary of your professional history, list any relevant publications. You don’t want to fill pages’ worth of urls and titles, only put the best ones up there. Afterwards (or before) add a quick note stating that you have a blog and that your archives can be accessed there.

Here’s how I started my Publications section:

Publication Credits

Matador:

Note: Because I write and publish on a daily basis at Matador, I’ve listed only a selection of work. For a more complete listing, please visit my author profile at the Traveler’s Notebook as well as my author page at Matador.

Notes on Celebrating New Year’s with Los Colque narrative nonfiction on life and culture in Patagonia

Notes on 2 Transparent Responses to Current Economic Climate for Writers  analysis of writers’ innovations in new media and community building

Writing by Remixing: Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver literary criticism and analysis of Gordon Lish’s edits of Raymond Carver’s story “Beginners”

[etc.]

Recent print and online publications outside of Matador:

Fodor’s Patagonia (Random House, 2009) Contributed chapter on Atlantic Patagonia.

Poem in Drash literary magazine, Summer 2009

[etc.]

Special Archived Selections outside of Matador:

“How to Rebuild a Paddle” Short Story for Mountain Gazette Fall 2006

Note that it isn’t necessary to link to every single piece. All that matters is that the CV transmits a sense of what you’ve done as a writer.

5. Try to end on something strong.

Depending on if you’ve won awards or not, you can choose to end your CV either with an awards section or a section on “Ongoing Projects.” Any awards you’ve won can leave whoever’s reading your CV with a positive impression of you. Don’t forget that college grants and scholarships can all be considered awards. Here was some of mine:

Study Grant awarded by Mountain Forum for Peace in Winter of 2005 to fund travels / research in Argentina for profiling the Madres of Plaza del Mayo.

“Three Fires” winner of the 1000 words contest in Mountain Gazette, November 2003

If you don’t have anything to put up as an award (or you have something, but you don’t want to end on that ‘note’), then close your CV with your current projects, whether they be blogs or any other major writing projects.

Quick Recap:

1. Start with your Name, Address, Phone / Fax / Skype, and email, each piece of info given its own line, centered and doublespaced. After this section, everything else is left-justified.

2. Educational History

3. Summary of Professional Experience

4. Publication Credits

5. Awards

6. Ongoing Projects

Community Connection

We’ve compiled lots of our notes on writing in a single page that covers everything from crafting narrative scenes to writing bilingual dialogue.

Also, be sure to visit NomadicMatt’s classic piece How to Make Travel Look Good on a Resume.

Image: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

1. Jason Paul living off Craigslist

Jason Paul has started living off Craigslist. In his own words:

… Jason Paul, a recent graduate from American University attempted, like many from the 2009 class, to secure a job. After applying for over 180 journalism jobs in over 35 states, Jason decided to pursue a blog/book idea of his own.

Right now, unless he is sleeping, Jason is doing something related to Craigslist.org. For those of you who do not know what Craigslist is, it is basically a classifieds page from the newspaper. The site is in 570 cities in 50 countries and allows users to post ads, with the exception of a few categories, for free.

Essentially, Jason is living off Craigslist.

This means food, housing, jobs, entertainment, friends and anything else you can possibly imagine.

So far he has traveled from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco, found housing, found a job and is beginning to make friends.

Jason blogs about everything he does in a transparent way. He includes the texts of emails within his blog posts. He blogs about training to work at Denny’s. He blogs about living in a basement.

The concept of livingcraigslist reminds me of thru-you in that Jason Paul is able to construct his artistic ‘product’ based strictly on different elements of social media and online communities.

2. Stephen Elliot Do It Yourself Book Tour

Stephen Elliot is the author of The Adderall Diaries, and half a dozen other books. In recent NYT essay, he explains how, instead of an underfunded, depressing, cheap hotel room-style book tour to “large coastal cities,” he put together a DIY book tour that took place at people’s houses.

He explains:

Before my book came out, I had set up a lending library allowing anyone to receive a free review copy on the condition they forward it within a week to the next reader, at their own expense. (Now that a majority of reviews are appearing on blogs and in Facebook notes, everyone is a reviewer.) I asked if people wanted to hold an event in their homes. They had to promise 20 attendees. I would sleep on their couch. My publisher would pay for some of the airfare, and I would fund the rest by selling the books myself.

What is most interesting to me about this is the effect the readings had. As venues were not bookstores but people’s homes, and audiences were not typical literary crowds but just friends of whichever reader hosted the event, the readings became long and intimate discussions. Stephen found that “In a weird way the readings began to feel like an extension of the book.”

Notes

1. Both writers / bloggers are using the internet to coordinate their ‘offline’ life, whether it’s promoting / organizing a book tour (S.Elliot) or ‘everything’ (J. Paul).

2. Jason Paul is essentially transforming his offline life into his online ‘art’.

3. The way they are leveraging their work on and offline represents an ethic of transparency.

4. Both writers’ responses facilitate the building of community both on and offline in ways that wouldn’t have happend had they followed traditional paths.

Community Connection

What other transparent responses to market pressures on writers and journalists have you heard about or experienced? Please share in the comments below.

Image: HikingArtist.com

AT MATADOR we usually avoid bigging ourselves up too much, but there have been some hardworking ninjas behind the scenes creating some great resources for writers and bloggers. I wanted to share some of the following:

How to Write

This page includes everything from how to write narrative essays using scenes to techniques for writing bilingual dialogue.

There are also lots of resources as far as magazines and websites you should know about.

Blogging Tips

Blogging tips is probably our fastest growing section of articles. There are resources here that can take you step by step through how to start a WordPress blog and finding a good WordPress theme.

If you’re already have a blog, this page also has good info on how to deal with content scraping and what to do with out of control comments.

Social Media

This page still has a lot more to add, but there are some really good resources here already on things like how to promote your photography online and utilizing retweets to become a twitter ninja..

Additional Resources

I also wanted to mention just a few of the other resources and communities outside of Matador that I visit at least on a semi-regular basis:

*New Pages – comprehensive listing of calls for submissions and literary magazines
*Practicing Writer – blog and site with focus on academic opportunities / discussions, and good market resources as well as interviews. Good newsletter.
*Brevity – blog on ‘creative nonfiction’, has good commentary, essays and news in the nonfiction ‘world’.

Community Connection

These are some of the resources out there for writers. What other ones do you use? Please let us know in the comments below, and thanks for visiting and sharing our focus pages.

Photo: Pink Moose

THERE’S AN old phrase Brian Eno supposedly said about the Velvet Underground. It goes something like “when the first Velvet Underground album came out, only about 1,000 people bought it, but every one of them formed a rock and roll band.”

I’m not sure what the sales of Raymond Carver’s first books were, but on a level of artistic influence you could apply a similar statement. People read him and want to become writers. Or they read him and it totally influences their style.

The way we internalize an artist’s work is what ultimately matters. It’s more important than the “truth” about a writer’s life. How can learning about Lou Reed’s adolescence possibly compare with hearing “Candy Says” for the first time during your own?

This is why when I found out that editor Gordon Lish is responsible for much of what I love about Carver’s short stories, it didn’t affect how I felt about him as a writer. If anything it makes him seem more real.

In December 2007, the New Yorker published the original version of Carver’s story “Beginners” overlaid with Gordon Lish’s edits so you can compare the draft with the final version of the story published as “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

The story is about a group of friends in their late 30s sitting around drinking and recounting different relationships, accidents, and people who committed suicide. Like most of Carver’s work, there is minimal plot / action, but instead a kind of tension (and weirdly powerful sense of compassion) that seems to drive everything forward.

Here are several notes about the way the story was edited (and in some cases, rewritten, by Gordon Lish). In the quoted examples, I’ve preserved the formatting as it was printed in the New Yorker, with Gordon Lish’s strikeouts + edits / writing in bold.  

1. Temporal references or references to backstory are cut or significantly reduced.

Ex: The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink.

Ex: He said When he was young he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He He’d left the Church at the same time, but he said he still looked back on to those years in the seminary as the most important in his life.

Throughout the story, Lish cut references to specific moments in time and specific backstory. This has the effect of making the story seem “truer,” as when we look back in time we rarely remember the exact day (or if we do it doesn’t really matter), but instead tend to organize our memories by “periods.”

If you imagine the story as a film, removing the backstory (where you’d have to cut to a different scene or flashback) and references to time also make the whole narrative move faster,  with more tension. It gives you the feeling that you’re speeding towards something (probably bad) happening.

2. Each sentence containing two simple clauses connected with the conjunction “but” is broken into two separate sentences.

Ex: We lived in Albuquerque, then. But but we were all from somewhere else.

This, one of the most characteristic elements of Carver’s style, wasn’t actually the way he wrote the drafts; it was the way Lish remixed it. Although this is a very subtle linguistic element, it’s notable (especially considering the time in which it was published) because (a) it “violated” the rule that you don’t start a sentence with a conjunction, (b) it went against the decades-old prose style pioneered by Hemingway of created long compound sentences with clauses often having little to do with one another but joined anyway by a conjunction, and most importantly, (c) it gave the text this fragmented and on-edge feel as if the narrator was incapable of just letting go (or something) but had to keep backing up everything he said with some other thought or emotion.

3.  Any dialogue that doesn’t sound like how people actually talk is changed to vernacular.

Ex: That old couple who had this car wreck got into an accident out on the interstate? A kid hit them and they were all torn to shit battered up.

Ex: I’d like to just knock on the door and let loose release a hive of bees in the house.

There are other effects that Lish added or emphasized such as parallel construction, repetition of certain phrases (”what we’re talking about”), and also changing the ending, however, the notes above are the easiest ones to pull from the story and explain.

Overall, I feel that Lish didn’t so much apply his own vision of what he thought the story should be, but more identified certain aspects of Carver’s style that could be condensed and magnified so that it was even more “Carver” than the original. I think this represents the ultimate work of an editor.

For writers (even travel or nonfiction writers), the obvious lesson here is that whether you work with others or just continually self-edit, there are infinite ways to remix the phrasing, sentence construction, amount of background info / temporal references, and dozens of other elements to achieve specific effects with your story.

Community Connection

Another closely related topic to editing is translating. Please see Leigh Shulman’s Notes on Iranian Translation, with an excerpt of her translation published at Guernica Magazine.

COMMUNITY FUNDED reporting. I like this idea a lot. Their domain name is sweet too, Spot.Us

Spot.us is, as stated in their elevator pitch-

a nonprofit project to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us the public can commission investigations with tax deductible donations for important and perhaps overlooked stories. If a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, donations are reimbursed. Otherwise content is made available through a Creative Commons license.
Read More

The basic concept is that you can donate $20 (or other amounts) to help fund currently accepted pitches, and you can also register, which enables you to submit your own pitches for consideration and funding.

Just to get an idea of what kinds of pitches are currently being funded, check out some of these titles:

*Who Benefits from the Legalization of Medical Marijuana

*American Apparel’s Firings: A Canary in the Immigration Policy Coal Mine

*New Depression in LA

Admittedly, I’ve only just briefly checked out this community, but I love what I see so far. There appears to be a very clean and straightforward system of submitting pitches, having work peer reviewed as well as work on stories in collaboration, something I believe will become more and more common to journalists working in 2010.

What really stokes me though about the concept of Spot.Us is that it’s locally-based (currently in the Bay Area and Los Angeles) yet scalable worldwide.

With current freelance writing rates bottoming out last year, Spot.Us gives writers a chance to make a decent rate for their work, and most importantly, pursue stories they might otherwise be unable to afford researching or going after. I would love to see this blow up around the country.

For more info, check out this slideshow:

Community Connection

What do you think about community funded reporting? Please let us know in the comments. We’d especially like to hear from any community members of spot.us.

Some of the Colque grandkids + Lau and Layla.

12/31/09 4 PM

Maxi is carrying crates of beer down into a well-pit. I whistle to him across the fence and he grins back at me.

Maxi is one of Adela’s 80 grandchildren. He’s about 17. When the men are working on a car he’ll look under the hood with them for a few minutes but that’s all. Afterwards he goes back to playing soccer with the younger kids. He’s just the right age, size, and strength to carry the beer down to cold water in the bottom of the well.

7:15-8:15 PM

Maradona gets the fire going around 7. I still haven’t learned everyone’s name yet, but he’s the one son who still lives in the house with Adela, and is middle aged, maybe 46. He doesn’t seem to have a wife, but perhaps is Maxi’s dad. He has hair like Diego Maradona.

Around 8 he sets up the asado: two Patagonian lambs flayed on racks and tilted towards the fire, and dozens of whole chickens and sausages laid out on different grills with shovelfuls of coals slid underneath.

We see Fatima wearing a ballerina outfit. Layla goes in to tell Mamá. “Nena vestido!” she says. “We’re going over in just a little bit,” I tell her. She goes back to her room and gets her striped dress and lays it out on the floor “Ese vestido,” she says.

9:20 PM

Lau gets out of the shower and puts on a blouse. It feels like we’re ‘going out’ even though we’re just walking next door. We take the camera. We take two bottles of cider and two pan dulces. The kids meet us out in the street and Brisa takes the bag of food and drinks from us. Two of the girls, Abril and Agustina reach up to carry Layla in but when she squirms and climbs further up into Lau’s arms. Adela stands by the door of the house smiling at us.

Three weeks ago she asked me if we have any family acá. I told her we don’t, that they’re all in Buenos Aires or “allá” which means back in the place my accent comes from. But then, perhaps because of the way she looked at me when I said this I felt the need to add something so I said “But we stay in touch with them on the computer.” She nodded and then said “Well if you don’t have plans for el 31, come over and spend it with us.”

Cordero. Photo by author.

9:40 PM

The men are standing by the fire passing around liters of beer. I tell Lau I’m going over there. Noel and the others boys try to get me to play soccer with them instead. I tell them in a minute.

There are about 8 men by the fire, all Adela’s sons or sons in law. I’ve only spoken to Maradona before and I feel embarrassed walking up. I don’t really know how to introduce myself but then we’re all more or less the same age (fathers with young children) and I just nod to everyone and step into an open place by the fire. The beer bottle comes around and I take a pull and pass it on.

I look at the fire and then ask Maradona how long it takes to cook cordero (2 hours on the ribs side, then 20 minutes).

I tell them about how people back where I’m from have pig-roasts. For a second it makes me think about a certain time (late 90s) and place (The Chattooga River) and people (raft guides and safety kayakers, most beer-drunk and tripping on acid or mushrooms on top of raft busses), and how at that time I had a much more limited perspective of acá and allá. But I can’t really explain that here so I just say “yeah, we roast the pigs by burying them for hours in hot coals.”

The beer comes back around to me again and I take a swig and then pass it to Noel and Brisa’s dad then walk back to the house to see how the girls are.

9:50 PM

The Colque’s house is unfinished concrete and block construction with windows missing but little details like wooden swans in the dooryard. For a second I just stand in the entrance and look inside. The stereo is playing cumbia and reggeton at med-high volume. There are probably 20 different Colque women, both Adela’s daughters and grandaughters inside the small kitchen / eating area. They’re all talking and laughing and rapidly preparing salads and tending to the children.

I’ve only met a few of them and up until now have only seen them in long sleeve shirts and sweatshirts for working in the farm. Tonight they have on dresses and blouses and I pretend not to notice (and they pretend not to notice me noticing) several of the young women’s large and in some cases enormous breasts.

Then a kid, maybe 16, his hair cut in 80s (The Cure) style pushes through the doorway behind me then pats me on the shoulder and as if reading my mind says “don’t be embarrassed, go in!”

10:00 PM

Back at the fire I ask questions about the land here, the well-pit (you hit water here in 3 meters).

I ask if the nearby creek ever floods (no, but the river does.) Adela’s husband, a skinny man in his 60s, offers me a cigarette. He speaks in a crazy slang and accent that I can barely understand. I ask about what it was like here before there was pavement on the highway. I ask about the Indians who were here before. “The viejos pobladores live up by Nahuel Pan,” Maradona says.

The food is nearly cooked and the women call for some more tables inside. I’m standing opposite of where a table is so I grab an end and help carry it towards the house.

10:30 PM

. Photo by Laura Bernhein

Adela has saved us seats next to her at dinner. Lau is asking about how each person in the room is related to the other.

There are so many people that if you need something (like water) you just yell it out over the music and then people keep repeating it across the room until whoever is in the kitchen passes it out and it moves from hand to hand across the room.

I cut a piece of sausage and fold it into a roll with chimichuri sauce and a salad of bittersweet greens.

It occurs to me that everything on the table except for the drinks and the salt and pepper was either grown or raised here. The cordero is salty and wild-tasting, an animal that lived its life grazing Patagonian grasses and wild rose. Layla grabs a piece off my plate and starts chewing (she’s been, up until now, a vegetarian). Lau and Adela both notice it and smile. “Más,” Layla says.

11:30 PM -12:30 AM

After dinner the kids start lighting fireworks in what would pass in the US as basically unsupervised pandemonium. Five year old girls are holding Roman candles and 7 year old boys are launching bottle rockets directly out of their hands. I have Layla up in my arms the whole time but she keeps squirming to get down. The kids come over and give her a sparkler.

12:45 AM

We go back to the house to put Layla to bed. Lau and I talk about the party. I tell her that the whole fireworks thing is an example of how people like the Colques simply live with less fear and worry than other people. “It’s like, sooner or later, one of them loses and eye or a hand or whatever,” I say. “But then instead of worrying about it, it’s just like ‘si, si, pobre Pablito, one year he was holding a Roman candle and the puta cosa just blew up in his hand.’”

Of course this is just the kind of bullshit you say when you don’t want there to be silence or talk about things that will make you depressed. But then Lau mentions that while Adela was explaining all the different relationships at dinner she had said that one of her kids had died. “She didn’t really go into it though,” Lau said.

1:00 AM

Photo by author.

Besides being New Year’s, the 31st is also Adela’s birthday. Lau stays back while Layla sleeps and I go over back over just to say thanks and goodbye.

I see a few of the men still by the fire but most everyone is back inside the house. I hear them singing. When I walk back in Adela has a knife and is cutting a cake the size of a small table. I look at the way she holds the knife and remember how yesterday she explained how to slice the roots of the thistles in the yard to make them easier to pull.

It occurs to me that when Lau brought up what Adela had said about a child dying, she wasn’t saying this in and of itself but was also thinking about the baby she miscarried a few months ago. Right now Lau would be around 6 months pregnant and we’re both grieving this in our own ways. The candles on Adela’s cake say 61. Each year you get older you learn how it feels to lose a little more. Adela looks at me standing there. She gives a nod indicating she understands we put Layla to bed. Then she cuts a big corner off the cake. “Llevátela.” she says. Take it back with you.

The author in Colorado. Photo: Lau

Now’s the season for year-in-review features and ‘looking ahead’ pieces, the kinds of stories that would seem little more than exercises in banality were they not necessary somehow to our sense of time and place.

Music countdowns, say the “Top 209 songs of 2009,” are perfect examples. By what criteria can we reduce music (or writing, or even people themselves–Traveler of the YEAR!!) into some kind of zero sum game?

Still, it occurs to me that even if the subjects and formats are unoriginal, just stopping and taking time to remember is a very human and life affirming act.

The other day Klaus and Manuel, two raft guides at Lat42Patagonia, asked about what I did. When I told them I was a writer, they asked the default question down here, which (as it should be) is “do you write books?”

“It’s mostly stories and articles online,” I explained. “One day I’d like to collect them into a book though.”

Anyway, the conversation left me thinking about people’s perceptions of what a writer is in 2009, and now looking ahead to 2010. Here are a few notes:

1. Blogger vs. Writer ‘debate’

Don’t waste time posturing or defending or shit-talking anyone in this silly-ass argument. Being a writer (or whatever) in 2010 means getting paid to write what you want to write. Part of this (perhaps all of it) will mean blogging; part will be journalism, fiction, poetry, whatever shape your imagination and work takes.

2. You don’t have to write a book.

As proven by NomadicMatt , you don’t have be writing a book to still be a financially successful writer and get featured in the New York Times

3. If you write a book, you can publish it yourself.

This year, Cory Doctorow showed that you can self-publish your work, give it away for free, and still make money by offering a print on demand option.

4. However, If all you want is to see your name in print, there are plenty of vanity-press operations ready to take your money.

Consider the move by Harlequin earlier this year wherein they began charging writers thousands to self-publish via their imprint.

5. You can make an enormous impact with simple ebook.

Earlier this month, Seth Godin’s ebook What Matters Now became a Trending Topic on Twitter, getting retweeted over 4,000 times.

6. Independent Publishing Houses

Writers seeking traditional book publication in 2010 will increasingly look to independent publishing houses.

7. Writing conferences will focus on social media.

Those attending conferences in 2010 will be bludgeoned by social media ‘gurus’ with pie graphs showing the correlation between your followers on twitter and your potential readership.

8. New forms

Hint Fiction, Micro-Notes, Segmented Essays, and other new forms of writing will become increasingly common, as writing continues to be optimized for reading on screens.

9. Multimedia

Writing / publishing / reading via mobile devices will lead to more experimentation with multimedia.

10. Real-time composition

New technology such as Google Wave combined with back-channel conversations being an increasingly important element of media events will mean that writers and journalists in 2010 will publish more work created in “real-time” as opposed to the the traditional process of drafts which are polished and edited before publication.

11. Revitalization of tribes

The democratization of media / disbanding of large publications will lead to writers building new communities in 2010. These include both official communities which exist online such as Fictionaut, SixSentences, or Matador, or just crews of writers who are associated with one another (via collective projects or similar styles), and thus can help mutually promote their work, such as the crew who runs HTML Giant.

12. Continuing Education

Looking beyond grad school and MFA programs, writers in 2010 will find increasingly relevant training and skills via online writing programs and learning centers.

13. Transparency

Whereas writers have traditionally had to make ethical choices when writing about places or stories to which they had material connections, writers in 2010 are essentially free to write about whatever they want, take whatever story they want, as long as their writing has an underpinning of material transparency.

14. Self Promotion

Although many writers may claim they didn’t go to journalism school to “sell themselves,” writers in 2010 need to find how they can best promote their personal brands.

Community Connection

Happy New Year everyone! How do you see being a writer in 2010?

The author in Colorado Flatirons. Photo: Lau

NOCHEBUENA is the “good night” before Christmas.

Here in Argentina it’s also when Santa comes–the kids staying up until 12 when it switches to actual Navidad and a family member dressed as Santa appears pillow-stuffed and possibly wine-drunk at the door. Presents are distributed. Everyone stays up all night. This is the answer for those who ask how Argentine kids seem to have no bedtimes but can still get up and function each morning. Like most things it comes down to imagination.

Birthdays are the same. No sense in wasting good nocturnal hours. I found myself promoting this earlier in the summer on a cross-country drive from Colorado back to Georgia. My bro Will Kimzey and I had committed to “Oklahoma in the dark” a new and spontaneous manifestation of our blow-it-out-in-a-single-push road trip style. PFunk was in heavy rotation. Once the clock got to 11:55 a.m. I started watching it carefully for my surprise happy bday bust-out. You can’t miss a second.

Right now our neighbors the Colques are hacking their back yard with a gas powered weed-eater, the preferred lawn tool in Patagonia perhaps after the machete. Not having any portable stereos, they’ve been parking cars back there the last several nights, pumping cumbia beats, playing soccer, and having the inevitable water fights.

The music takes me back to a Nochebuena in Colorado, 2005. After a day of fresh pow at our local mountain, Eldo, I got back to my truck and KGNU’s Latin Christmas tunes.

Even though most of the songs were simple sons and rhumbas about things like christmas trees and eating roasted pig, something about the juxtaposition–the Rocky Mountain snow still floating down and filling in the lines I’d left in on the mountain (another pow day tomorrow), my hands and face still stinging cold, but this music on the radio that could’ve only come from someplace warm and near the ocean–all of it combined in a moment of transcendence where it felt like I could almost make out ‘where we were headed’ (towards this music). It was a moment of both ultra stoke and nonspecific loneliness, and I think there may have been a bit of sacred weeping.

It’s difficult for me to register events or contextualize emotions without there being some kind of soundtrack. Certainly iPods have stifled some of the spontaneity and chance that post snowboarding parking-lot moments like these might turn transcendent, the DJ down in the valley seeming to pick each tune in a way that helps your life push downstream a little smoother and maybe with a bit more reach and gamble and appreciation than if you’d chosen your own playlist.

But then it’s all a matter of how the day unfolds. Yesterday morning I was reading Kierkegaard’s journals and listening to Outkast at the same time, an overtly discordant pairing until the track “Unhappy” came on and Big Boi sang, “might as well have fun cuz your happiness is done when your goose is cooked.”

Layla just woke up and ran in here naked, holding two of her “babies” and asking for her morning jugo. I’m reminded again of how it works. It’s time to slice oranges. Merry Christmas.

Rio Azul, just below confluence. All photos by David Miller.

SOMETIMES ALL IT TAKES is showing up. This occurred to me during the hike into the confluence of Rios Azul and Blanco near El Bolsón, Patagonia, pausing for a moment to rest the knees and study the terrain–the two rivers dropping out of steep notches in the cordillera, then joining in the valley where I could hear whitewater hundreds of meters below.

Today was a paddle day. I was coming to visit Shea Jordan and the crew at Lat42South for a Sunday run down the Confluence section of the Rio Azul. They were looking for another safety kayaker and I was looking for (after being down here pretty much solo for three weeks), my gente.

We let the world become more complicated than it needs to be. Know who your tribe is and you’re most of the way there. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Seattle or San Juan del Sur: my gente are the people who go up and down mountains and rivers and waves.

Just before reaching the bottom of the road I met up with a local kid, maybe 25, named Federico. He was going on the trip as a passajero (test dummy). We got down to the river, hiked upstream and then crossed a dilapidated footbridge. The river flowing below was totally clear.

Chacra on the road to the confluence.

This was my first time seeing any of this part of the Andes, essentially the base of the glaciated peaks I find myself constantly looking at from town.

Unlike the US and other parts of the world, there are no trophy houses built up on the mountainsides. Most of the population lives in the valley, in town.

There were still people back here but they were essentially gauchos, people who lived an agrarian life on small farms.

We ascended several more switchbacks, then the trail rounded off at a broad saddle of land above the confluence. Knolls of pastureland, gently sloping, rolled down to orchards and gardens with small outbuildings set into the hillside, the grass covering over the roofs.

Inside, Shea and and several other kids were sitting on the sofas. I was introduced to Claus and Manuel, two young raft guides who lived nearby. Omar, Shea’s business partner from Buenos Aires, was also there. We talked about the run today, the river level.

Cellar / outbuilding at La Confluencia.

I realized I was witnessing (and in some way, participating in) something amazing. After spending what seems like my entire youth hanging around different rivers and raft companies that had been in business for decades, here were these kids setting up a brand new one, on an essentially virgin stretch of river, a place that had been run so few times only a couple spots even had names.

Shea took me on a quick tour of the lodge. The building was shaped like a shallow V with dormitories on one wing and a private suite plus office / library on the other.

The two were joined via a common area with a deck overlooking the gorge. The lower level was all open with a kitchen plus huge walk-in pantry (stacked floor to ceiling with fruit preserves they’d canned themselves and herbs from the garden) on one side, then a lounge area with ping-pong table and TV on the other.

At the center was a massive wood-burning stove and sofas. Everything was made out of rough-cut native cypress, and the main level walls were straw bale with adobe. It was an ideal juxtaposition: you could hear the river down below, see the mountains all around, and there was WiFi.

Take out of Confluence section through local sheep farm.

We went outside then, past the parilla (grill), then up the hill to the spa, yoga room, plunge pool, and, at the very top, the hot tub. Shea showed me some of the mechanical rooms, and he explained how a small scale hydroelectric turbine powered the whole place, along with a methane processor that transformed waste materials into gas for cooking.

We didn’t go out to the fields, but Shea explained how guests were served food that was all produced here locally.

They also hosted WWOOF volunteers at different times during the year. There were two volunteers here now, both improbably beautiful girls from the Czech Republic.

The entire ‘operation’ was obviously something that Shea’s family had put decades of learning, experience, vision into. It was a working example of land-use, food production, and integration of local (and worldwide) communities and economies, all based on an ethic of environmental stewardship and sustainability.

Next we stopped at boat shed. Shea was taking down a Necky Chronic; I grabbed a Wavesport ZG + gear. (The rest of the crew would be taking down a high-performance raft called a Mini-Me).Then we waited for the Manuel and Omar to get back from running shuttle (they were leaving one of the trucks down at the takeout and coming back on a motorcycle).

Terminator. Classic class III/IV rock jumble with epic boof line.

While we hung out on the porch, Claus asked me the series of questions that inevitably ends with “why did you move down here?”

I told him:

“Es una cosa cultural. It’s not that we don’t like the US. It’s just that there’s something down here about the culture.

Take this for example. Two days ago I called up Cristian Ferrer [owner of a rafting operation on lower section of river]. I called him de la nada (‘out of the blue’) and told him I was a paddler who’d just moved to town and was hoping to meet some other boaters.

He was like ‘che, I’m heading into town right now, let’s meet up.’ And so we did. He invited me back to his house, and to go paddling that day. That’s how I met Shea and Omar. Then you guys invited me here. It was all one flow.

It’s not that this couldn’t happen in the US, but it’s just different. People back there have a million things to do. They need to check their calendars. They need to ‘check your references’.

The idea of operating on flow and buena onda still exists, but it isn’t part of the culture like it is here. People schedule dates for their kids to play with each other. We just wanted our daughter to grow up with a different onda.”

Claus nodded and looked at me in a way like he was really listening, really hearing this. I thought for a minute how strange it would be if the roles were switched, if I were back in the US listening to some Argentino explaining why he moved there.

A few minutes later Manuel and Omar came back and then we all suited up and carried down to the water. I couldn’t quite believe how, if you stayed or lived here, you could literally just wake up in the morning, whip up some breakfast, check the internet for a while, then walk down the stairs and go boating in water that was pure enough to drink.

Put in at Rio Azul. Water is totally potable.

On the beach, riverside, the raft crew had a safety talk while Shea and I got in our kayaks and ferried back and forth between two eddies. The river was clear and cold and different shades of blue and green that flowed through the Baldivian (mostly species of beech trees + cypress) forest.

I cupped my hand and drank right from the river, a first. Totally savoring this, a new home river. A new local crew. Stoke is an immediate feeling. Gratitude is stoke sustained. Somehow I was feeling both as we peeled out from the eddy and floated down to the first rapids. This was only the beginning.

Community Connection

For more information, please check Lat42South as well as the lodge’s site, La Confluencia.

Additionally, Shea’s dad, Mark Jordan is a co-creator of the exceptional CIESA, an ongoing educational and research project focusing on sustainable agriculture in Patagonia.

Matador Editor David Miller at ‘the office’.

YESTERDAY A RECENT graduate, AdventureRob, had this to say in his candid review of MatadorU’s travel writing curriculum: “The course doesn’t just concentrate on travel writing, but life as a travel writer in the modern world.”

It’s funny how hearing other people describe something can make you look at it with a new perspective. I never would’ve thought to express it this way (I never think of myself as living the “life of a travel writer” even though that’s the life I have essentially), and yet somehow this statement points at something fundamental about the course as well as something we like to call the Matador “vision” itself.

The other day I met Christie Pashby, a professional guidebook writer and director of the Patagonia Travel Company. We took a float trip down the lower whitewater section of the Rio Azul. She was asking about Matador, and then we realized she’d actually contributed to one of the very first articles here on the Traveler’s Notebook.

More than anything, Christie seemed to be lamenting the disintegration of old-school media, saying (with regards to blogging / creating a personal brand), that she “didn’t go to journalism school to ’sell herself’.”

I told her I understood completely. The motivations behind one’s need to write and tell stories are often antithetical to earning a living. So when there’s a structure in place that allows you to do both (such as traditional journalism over the last several decades) you want to see it continue to progress.

But what I love about the media revolution, the “modern world” that Rob alludes to, is that it essentially is a progression of the old school. The elements of good reporting, good writing, good storytelling are universal whether you’re blogging or working on a profile for your local paper.

What’s happened though, is that as media has become democratized, liberated from location, traditional ‘training’, and workplace hierarchies (among hundreds of other changes) the new paradigms are unfamiliar.

As I talked about yesterday, we have no map.

This is where MatadorU comes in. In essence it all comes down to a question Christie asked me: “Are your students actually making it?”

“It’s early,” I told her, “But yeah. We’re already seeing students making the leap to becoming fully independent freelance writers . Others we’ve pulled aboard our team. It’s not overnight, but yeah, I can honestly say that it’s working.”

The thing is (and I think I can safely speak for everyone who participated in the creation of MatadorU), there’s no real credit to be taken on our part as far as students’ successes. This is perhaps the greatest lesson of MatadorU, and the way in which it most closely aligns itself with new school paradigms of becoming a professional writer, blogger, or whatever: it comes down to how bad you want it, how much energy you’re willing to put into it.

And a close second to this is the way we tend to organize ourselves into tribes. What’s now a social media buzzword, and one of Seth Godin’s bestsellers, has been known to teachers forever. As I said a few months ago during one of the more spontaneous and lucid moments in an interview (I get nervous during interviews and tend to drink beer) at Travel Writer’s Exchange:

“It’s not coincidental that many of the original staff and members of Matador have backgrounds in education. Teachers are different. We’re always seeking to build community.”

The bottom line is that at Matador we embrace new media and respect the vision of those who choose to support themselves traveling, writing, filming, recording, and taking pictures around the world. This is our tribe. MatadorU is just a way for us–both students and teachers–to help each other add our names and lines to the map.

Community Connection

How do you apply your training and skills as a journalist to the new media revolution? Please share with us in the comments below.

Internet map by The OPTE project

AFTER READING the following post by Marie, I started wondering how to visually represent what she was talking about.

Then I found (duh) there actually are people mapping the internet via IP address as well as other metrics which, to be honest, I don’t really want to even try to understand.

Marie wrote:

When I start reading a blog or a Tweet by someone I don’t know and then click on one of their contacts’ blogs or something else on their page, it seems I inevitably end up on the page of someone I know from Flickr, Twitter, my own blog readers, Matador, etc. How is that? Are we all getting our contacts from each others pages or is it just that the people you are friends with just have the same taste as you? I’d really like to see a drawing of the map I take when on the net and how it matches up with the map of others. Do they have that yet? I’m sure I’d be going round in circles and eventually passing through the circles of others.

–from Social Networking: How would it work in real life?

Marie goes on to describe a scenario wherein the virtual friending or unfriending of social media contacts plays out in the real world. You simply meet someone and instantly, effortlessly accept or reject them.

But what I loved more than anything about this post was the notion of just going around in circles, bumping into others, and the inherent tendency to form tribes (something Seth Godin would surely approve).

What speaks to me, what interests me about social media, microblogging, ambient awareness, location ‘independence’, accelerated culture (Does that term still apply? Does twitter make us ‘post-accelerated’ culture?) basically the entire amorphous realm of computer mediated communication, is that there really is no map, no precedent. Like Marie, I could use a drawing.

Community Connection

From the very beginning of Matador we’ve been stoked on the voices and exchange of ideas coming out of our community site. To make sure more of these ideas, photos, and blogs reach more people, we’ve begun pulling the best of the community blogs up into the Network sites. To participate, please join the Matador Community!

Image: Paul Stevenson

IT’S NO original insight that being a writer is a problematic gig vis-à-vis your mental health.

This seemed evident again on the way to the bank last week when I saw a Mapuche man with the perfect look of a TV or movie ‘Indian chief’ only he was dressed more or less like me (jeans, collared shirt) and stood on the sidewalk unwrapping a stick of gum.

Suddenly I thought of a short story or perhaps feature film idea where the protagonist’s brain is wired so that whenever he sees someone, their clothing, hairstyle, jewelry, all magically revert back several generations to their original ‘ethnicity’.

In this case the Indian man would have on skins, possibly war paint. The girl of what appeared to be Spanish descent walking by us with the ass-enhancing pantware would instead have on some kind off Medieval gown. My wife (of Swiss, German descent), would be sporting an Oktoberfest maiden’s beer serving apparel and Teutonic braids. That sort of thing.

Of course even as I was visualizing all of this I realized that (a) trying to apply any kind of reductionism to one’s ethnic lineage seemed dubious and deluded and borderline dangerous, (b) presenting people this way was far less interesting and life-affirming than seeing their ‘real’ reality right at present time, ground level, (c) part of this idea occurred surely because I have a tendency to reduce people this way myself, say 14% of the time–not appearance-wise, but more a form of cultural / behavioral stereotyping, and (d) the beleaguered protagonist could be played by Ashton Kutcher in a ‘breakout’ production which somehow involved Twitter, Larry King, and the first ever “real-time major motion picture experience with live social media back chat.”

Actually I just invented that last one. By the third or fourth step past the Mapuche man I’d already given up on the idea.

Instead of contriving a story arc wherein Kutcher’s character learns to ‘see people for themselves’ (the payoff of which would surely hinge on a make-out scene with someone ambiguously ‘ethnic’ (but definitely hot)), I began to think about ways of seeing people that can sabotage your writing. Here’s what I have so far:

1. Romanticizing someone else’s life (Ex.: A mountain guide in Ecuador.)

2. Appropriating someone else’s problems / struggle as your own. (Local people being displaced by newer, wealthier immigrants or tourism.)

3. Believing that someone is a “father / mother / brother / sister figure”

4. Making assumptions based on cultural heritage.

5. Isolating people from time / place / family relationships so that they become, essentially, symbols or simply props for the narrator or author’s ego.

6. Attributing the emotions someone made you feel (especially if you’re observing them from a distance instead of interacting) back to them. (Ex. “The carefree Cuban woman.”)

7. Dismissing material / economic connections between yourself and others (The “incredibly affable taxi drivers,” in Costa Rica.)

8. Seeing people exclusively through the filter of strictly-held philosophical, religious, or artistic beliefs / aesthetics.

For travel writers moving quickly through a place, it’s easy to fall into the trap of writing quick notes or impressions, which by default tend to reduce people to symbols or caricatures.

More difficult, more time consuming, is digging for the people’s voices and stories over time and finding common ground in spite of cultural differences, language, and geography.

Finally, how to ‘overcome’ problematic ways of seeing people? The first step is obviously recognizing when you’re doing it. Just being self aware–knowing that you have certain ways you look at things and being as transparent about it all as you can–goes a long way.

It goes without saying as well that none of the above are really 100% fixed “rules” or anything. For example, you could portray a scene where you broke # 5 and still write a compelling piece. It just becomes a question of how much you want to focus on place and people vs. your own experience.

Community Connection

As writers, what choices do you make when it comes to including people in your stories?

How do you present them so they aren’t just props?

I HAVE NO interest in media deathwatches. I published a few pieces on newspaper circulations taking massive hits a couple months ago, and am over it. We all know (I think) where this is going.

For me it’s always about people, places, and communities, not institutions. So that said, yesterday’s news that National Geographic Adventure was folding made me sad for the writers and editors who lost their jobs, and how this will likely play out at ground level (the fragmentation of what I imagine to be a very soulful and tight community), but I’m not 100% sure that, as Steve Casimiro said, “outdoor culture is far emptier for this news.”

Outdoor culture is made emptier when a beloved person (Shane McConkey comes to mind) or place (say, a river being dammed) is lost. But the institutions themselves, whether media companies, magazine, or gear companies, are still only peripheral. They’re always in the wavelike process of forming, swelling, breaking, and reforming. At least that’s how I see it.

After getting laid off from USA Today, Travel Editor Chris Faust’s goodbye to USA Today blog expressed similar remorse. This firing wasn’t just his team getting axed but an affront to the institution of journalism.

She writes, “What bothers me the most is what my firing represented. See, I’ve been learning all the tricks that a modern multi-platform journalist is supposed to know. In the past 22 months, I’ve blogged, tweeted, shot photos and videos, and handled speaking engagements…I hustled and I cajoled and I ended up out on my ass anyway…I’m a true believer in the power of journalism. I walked into my first newspaper office when I was 16, fell in love with deadlines and chaos, and never looked back.. . I felt it was a calling, more so than a job.”

I like how Faust looks downstream at freelancers “creating niche businesses, busting up the paradigm.” She writes, “These freelancers-slash-entrepreneurs are smart. They are nimble. And now they are my role models, as I join their ranks.”

And if anything, I respect Faust for looking ahead, and I respect the NatGeo Adventure editors / officers for simply calling it and moving on as opposed to flailing (like the Dallas Morning News section editors now reporting directly to sales managers) or in some way undercutting their original vision.

All of this leads me back to Matador. From our start in 2006, the vision has always been to enable writers to take the path of least resistance between place, story, and reader. It’s something that never could’ve existed pre-internet, but at the same time is an ethic born out of relating to place and community in the most on the ground, person-to-person way possible.

As a writer and old-school journalist myself, my initial instinct was to press CEO Ross Borden towards coming up with some kind of print manifestation of Matador. An anthology perhaps, a monthly print edition. I felt it would be a validation of sorts.

Ross was always looking farther downstream however, and could already see a new direction–readership, community, and media based on blog networks–as the future. This blog in particular, The Traveler’s Notebook, was the first we decided to launch. It would help give people tools and resources for becoming new school travel writers and journalists.

From here we’ve put everything we’ve learned into a new media learning center, MatadorU. As I said earlier, I’m not interested in seeing old school journalists getting beat down. I want to see people with stories worth telling, regardless of institutions, get the audience that they (both the writers and the stories) deserve.

Community Connection

How are you, as a writer and / or journalist, dealing with the revolution taking place in publishing and journalism? Please let us know in the comments.

BACK WHEN I was doing a lot of remixing and audio production I always dreamed about having some kind of ‘brain machine’ that would simply extract whatever rhythms or melodies you were hearing in your head and export them directly to .wav files.

Obviously this is still a ways downstream, but I have no doubt there will be something like it eventually, with odds on Google as the people who figure it out.

Anyway, a few days ago our new associate editor Candice Walsh sent me an invite to try Google Wave, and it reminded me of the brain machine, or at least the spirit of the brain machine concept. If you haven’t heard about it yet, here’s an overview.

The best way I can describe it (admittedly after just messing around), is to compare it to Twitter. You invite people to join in a new “wave” (kind of like a timeline) and everyone can add updates / ideas / photos. The whole thing is then collected in a kind of live document known as a Google “Wave.”

The reason why I compare it to Twitter is that the creation of the wave happens in real-time, and you can actually go back and use a control panel similar to a MP3 player to ‘replay’ it.

This ‘live’ element makes Google Wave particularly interesting for applications like group brainstorms, the kind of thing we do a lot of here at Matador. You can actually ’see’ people typing, which gives a uniquely transparent look at how they work / think. Until they come up with the Brain Machine, I think this is potentially the most exciting aspect of new technology, (and one that should interest writers in particular), the ability to work with other people to create multimedia content in real time.

Also of interest to writers and journalists will be using Wave to create more in-depth back-channel conversations, a form of ‘augmented reality’, during media coverage of events. Earlier this month, freshnetworks blogged about using Google Wave vs. Twitter at conferences, pondering the future of both, and asking if “augmented reality” (a term which honestly seems to fit a stoner’s lexicon better than social media) – will be the next “major influence?”

The one drawback that I see so far is that Google Wave does not seem intuitive at all. Basically most of us are used to thinking linearly when it comes to writing emails, chatting, and using the computer in general. You go from one line to the next. Google Waves are organic, non-linear, more like a map (the Wave engineers were the same who created Google Maps). The conversations can sprout multiple branches, each leading in different directions.

If you’ve received an invite and are having trouble getting started, an excellent resource is Get Started with Google Wave.

Community Connection

Travelers, writers: what experience have you had so far with Google Wave? How do you see being able to use it as a writer?

Let us know in the comments below.

AS WRITERS, any tasks that take away from writing time can quickly become tedious and frustrating.

None, at least to me anyway, seems more of a time-suck than dealing with social media.

It’s taken me forever, but I’ve finally started using something that Matador Video Editor Joshywashington clued me into several month ago, Ping.

Ping is a dead simple way to update literally dozens (most likely all) of the new media and social media apps and even blogs you’re writing by sending whatever text / photos / tags/ html via an easy to use dashboard. You can choose to update blogs (at Tumblr, Blogger or Wordpress.com, among others) or update status (at Twitter, Facebook and dozens of others) and also add to YouTube, Vimeo and other content sharing sites.

For people just getting started with social media, updating multiple blogs / apps might seem strange or unnecessary, but for spreading your message and building your brand, each one of these little updates and posts helps to further increase your internet footprint.

Ping is super easy to get started using. Try simply opening your account and then adding a test post to your blog or twitter account. From there you’ll get the feel.

Community Connection

For recent tips on social media and branding for travel writers, check out How to Develop a Personal Brand as a Writer as well as becoming a Twitter Ninja: Understanding Rewtweets.

Also, does anyone have any particular tips or expertise for using Ping? Please share with us in the comments below.

My new barrio (Arrayanes), Piltriquitron in backround.

Admittedly crappy photo (Malbec, cold hands).

AFTER 6 DAYS I feel like I know at least where the sun rises.

This time of year it comes up over the northern flank of Cerro Piltriquitron, just north of the most jagged comb ridge.

Arriving in a new place there’s that need to ubicar, to locate, and not just external things like where they sell homemade bread or empanadas or bed sheets, but to actually be ubicado, to feel yourself located in the place.

For me it always begins with place names and terrain features of the surrounding foothills and outlying ranges, any water–rivers, oceans–as well as prevailing wind or weather directions. In places where the urban or suburban landscape is so sprawled that none of these landmarks are available (Buenos Aires) getting located seems more an act of trust.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. I woke up in a semi-funk, a new reality seeming to set in that (a) in all my time traveling (probably 3 years combined) I’ve never really thought of myself as an ‘ex-pat’ but I sort of felt like one now, and (b) I have no real emotional reference or precedent for any of this. My default reaction was to head up into the mountains.

Chacras below Piltriquitron. Image: Tetsumo

I took the road past our land then cut north on Camino de los Nogales. This is the most desirable land in all of Patagonia, and chacras, or farms (most of them organic) run along both sides of the road all the way to the foot of Cerro Piltriquitron.

Except for the Caranchos (Polyborus plancus), these kind of South American hawks that have wings shaped like condors’, there seemed to be no movement or people anywhere. I realized it was siesta.

Up the road were broad fields with rows of raspberry bushes and hops for the local breweries. All along the edges grew lupine and other wildflowers. It was hot enough, finally, that I took off my polypro shirt and moved under the shade of the Nogales (walnut trees).

After a while I found a horse trail which veered away from the road and along a forest preserve. At one point I saw movement, which turned out to be two horses. One had his head down feeding, then raised his neck up and transfixed me with ultra pale blue eyes. Then they both disappeared into the woods.

Another 10 minutes of walking and I found an easy place to duck through the fence wires. This wasn’t necessarily the high mountain access I was looking for, but then it seemed like this hidden patch of woods was actually better–out of the sun, out of view.

When I’m feeling depressed it helps to temporarily disappear (ideally inside a wave but that’s a different story), and I realized that in some ways this was as off the map as I’d been in a long time. In what guidebook or any book was this little patch of native Cypress forest?

Later I walked back to town and bought a couple folding chairs and my own little Thanksgiving dinner, a thin carving of bife de lomo with mashed potatoes, which I intended to prepare later with emotionally bolstering doses of raw garlic, fresh parsley, and Malbec.

That evening I was on my pre-dinner wine-stroll through the neighborhood, trying to get a good picture (seemed impossible), and on the way back, there was the moment, finally, where I officially met all the kids who live next door (13, somehow all under the ages of 15).

The way you interact with the local kids in a new place is probably the single most important (and revealing) situation you face as that privileged mofo now living in their neighborhood. No psychoanalyst or therapist can ever give you a more honest or dead-on assessment of who you are than the kids who seem to be playing all day in the dirt, but actually have their eyes on you all the time, and see through fronts.

What soccer in Patagonia looks like. Image: jaytkendall

Anyway, I had a cup of wine in my hand. The whole crew was in the area between our two houses, the two oldest boys with a soccer ball. One of them saw me coming and meant to get out of the way but then realized I was actually coming for the ball.

He tried to dribble past me then but I shot in and got the ball (saying something which came out, I think as, Huaa!) then dribbled around in the dust holding my wine-cup above our heads (both of us laughing) until he, of course, got the ball back. Little dude actually had on cleats.

“What’s in your cup?“ the kid asked.

“Wine,” I said. “Today is a holiday where I’m from [this seemed like a good justification] Thanksgiving.”

“Where are you from?”

“Georgia. Los Estados Unidos. Te ubicas? It’s the state right above Florida.”

The whole circle of the kids closed in then, three other boys, and four girls aged from 5 to maybe 10, each carrying on her hip a different dirt-faced and hugely-smiling baby.

I simultaneously thought (a) if only I could take a picture of these faces right now, of how stoked they are, (b) if my mom saw the picture she’d probably see first how dirty they are and then every other potential emotion / perception would likely be blocked out except for fear and anxiety over my choice to come down here, and (c) how stoked is Layla going to be to meet this crew?

The girls wanted to show off the babies to me. The boys wanted to know if I had a car (I pointed to my shoes.) I explained to everyone that my wife Lau and daughter Layla were coming next week along with our fat cat Lulu and our dog Julio.

I asked about their dogs, which one was the most bravo, and then as if on cue there was some kind of movement in the bushes down the street and all 3 of their dogs took off with their cat taking the opportunity to escape out the back of the yard. Immediately all of the boys started hollering and running after them.

After this I slid back home and skyped my parents for Thanksgiving. The stoke level which I had guarded rather shakily all day seemed to evaporate instantly as I listened to my mom’s plaintive voice describing the ‘concert’ performed by the cousins’ kids. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to listen to that, it’s just that the questions we should’ve been asking each other–how are you–were caught up somehow, unable to flow.

I know they’re suffering because to them I’m no longer ubicado. Seattle was far away from Florida but still essentially on the map. Patagonia is an abstract concept, someplace unimaginably distant (even if it’s not), even though we’re still talking right there on the phone.

The Sun is past morning angles now, high over the valley, although this house has yet to warm up. To locate and be located, not off in some dream or illusion but right at ground level, wherever you are when you finish reading or writing, wherever you are when you fall asleep or wake back, blinking there for a few minutes as you look out your tent or window: you just want to keep telling yourself, your family, everyone, “Don’t be afraid, be stoked! This is all of us together, just moving downstream, you see?”

Community Connection

How do you reconcile traveling in totally different directions than you your friends and family? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo: Laura Bernhein

Ben Polansky

1. Love of my family
2. Company of my friends
3. The touch of my girlfriend
4. The cool side of the pillow.
5. The smile from the woman at the bakery on my way to work.
6. Playing music with my friends.
7. The sunny side of the street on a cool day in San Francisco.
8. The tickle of a cue tip in my ear.
9. Listening to old Blues records on a rainy day.
10. Surfing at sunset.
11. My goddaughter’s curly hair.
12. Sticking my face in a warm pile of laundry.
13. Napping in a hammock in the sun.
14. A hard day’s work.
15. Watching young people learn.
16. Watching old people learn.
17. Ice cubes in my orange juice.
18. Listening to Barack Obama talk about hope and change
19. Teaching someone something new.
20. Reading people’s travel blogs about adventure and discovery on Matador.

Julie Schwietert

21. A stack of books brought home from the library, even when I know I’ll never finish them all.
22. The memories of listening to people’s stories as I traveled this year.
23. Watching weavers crush moss, berries, and nuts in Teotitlan del Valle, Mexico, as they make natural dyes.
24. Cooking with my husband.
25. The warmth of my dog as she jumps into bed in the morning.
26. Reading articles written by people living the Matador vision.
27. Reading a line that resonates so deeply it makes me see something in a new way.
28. Guessing the spices and ingredients in the food we eat.
29. Dreaming about going back to places I’ve been.
30. Making plans for the after-school program in Colombia.
31. Having found long-lost friends this year.
32. Thinking about learning a new language online.
33. Waking up from a good sleep.
34. Knowing the day will be incredible when the morning coffee is just right.
35. Pulling up the window shade and seeing a brilliant blue sky.
36. Receiving a real letter.
37. Checking the mail.
38. Leaving home.
39. Going home.
40. Having the opportunity to meet up in person with people I’ve met online via Matador– in Mexico, in the US.
41. Knowing that Matador members went to Cuba this year and saw things for themselves…and had an amazing experience.
42. Thinking back to election night and seeing images of people around the world gathered together, in communities, dancing in the streets.
43. Wandering markets in Mexico.
44. Thinking about January 20, 2009.
45. Feeling better after you’ve been feeling bad.
46. Reading blogs of Matador members outside the Matador community: www.bigsweettooth.com, www.miller-david.com, and others
47. Reading what makes other people grateful.

Al

48) Competition
49) Running really fast
50) Building, supporting, and maintaining a family
51) Fathering
52) Bob Marley tunes anywhere anytime
53) Kisses
54) Health
55) Cool breeze on a hot day
56) Warmth of a fire at night
57) Homecomings
58) Barefeet on grass
59) Barefeet in sand
60) Taking off your shoes and socks after a long day
61) Mixed couples
62) Biracial Children
63) Dancing
64) A Fresh Haircut
65) Summertime
66) Stretching in the morning
67) Last, but not least: New Socks and New Underwear. I know they cost money, but come on…There’s really no better feeling.

Hard not to give repeats.

Kdeez

68. My beautiful wife who is a strong, intuitive, loving mother and who understands and loves me for who I am.
69. My joyful son, Raja, who is smart, always smiling, outgoing and brave.
70. My mother who is gentle and kind, and who I am continually able to learn from.
71. My brothers and sisters who are creative and intelligent and a joy to be around.
72. My friends who are fun to spend time with and who are true to themselves.
73. My business where we are able to work with friends and family and contribute to open source communities.
74. My coworkers who are smart, dedicated and know what needs to be done and do it without having to be told to.
75. Our clients who are open to using open source software and choose to work with us.
76. Open source software communities and the developers that make them possible by contributing their code and free time towards sharing and openness.
77. Drupal. It’s a great tool and framework to use for building all different types of websites and web applications.
78. The universe that always provides and brings the right things to us at the right times.
79. The sun that provides light and warmth and allows us to have rain and support life.
80. The earth that provides nutrients and soil by which food can be grown as well as many other natural resources.
81. The air which we breath, allowing our brains and bodies to function.
82. The water, the most fulfilling and important substance on this earth.
83. Mother nature and all that she encompasses, plants, animals, the mountains, valleys, oceans, and more.
84. The people that grow our food.
85. The people that make our clothes.
86. Having a roof/shelter over my head.
87. Having food in my belly everyday.
88. The waves and rythm of the energy by which all things move.
89. Music, dancing sound waves that fill our soul with emotions and happiness.
90. Memory that allows me to remember my childhood and allows me to learn from the past.
91. Yoga, passed down from ancient times, that allows us to keep our mind, body and soul healthy and in harmony.
92. Exercise, keeping our body in good health and shape so that we’re able to live happily.
93. Meditation, helping to focus our minds and connect with who we really are internally.
94. The good health of my current body.
95. The hiking and biking trails all over the world which help us spend quality time with nature.
96. For the ocean, wind, and surfable waves which help me to get out in the ocean, recharge my batteries, surf, and experience being free.
97. That George Bush is out of office and that we have a new president that has some intelligence and actually cares about his job and this country.
98. That there has been a wake up call for the economy and irresponsible corporations who have been leeching the people and nature for all they have.
99. Almost being out of debt.
100. Thanksgiving Day, for reminding me to think of the things I’m thankful for and for getting friends and family together to share in thanks.

Ross Borden

101. My three amazing sisters
102. Mi mum
103. The Pacific Ocean
104. Powder snow
105. California redwood forests
106. Singing in the shower
107. Battle dancing
108. Being a dork with my little sisters
109. Lucy’s ninja-ness
110. Clara’s sense of humor
111. Reading stories to little billies
112. People watching in hilarious circumstances
113. Bouldering outside with the homies
114. TAPAS in Granada (free with the purchase of a beer)
115. The rights we enjoy as Americans
116. Thanksgiving – the only holiday where someone isn’t trying to sell you something
117. The culinary genius that is Tex Mex
118. A wagging greeting from a happy dog
119. Wrestling with the girl I love
120. Laughing with old friends about our antics in high school
121. A breath of fresh air, por las montañas
122. Being proud again to be an American!
123. My hippie friend, Ben Polansky
124. The superstokeinspiration that I get everyday from reading what you’re all up to out in the world!

Hal Amen

125. Dreams (nightmares included)

Nick Polansky

126. Laughing with friends.
127. Dancing with friends.
128. Dancing with family.
129. Watching family and friends dance.
130. Making furniture out of junk.
131. Selling furniture made out of junk.
132. A ripe persimmon from the garden.
133. Hard work.
134. A saliva smeared sketch on a napkin.
135. Hand-me-down overalls.
136. Toe stretches.
137. Head rubs.
138. Getting a hair cut from a roommate.
139. Walking the dog.
140. Water.
141. Rain.
142. Fire.
143. Hummingbirds in the tree outside my kitchen.
144. Samples at Trader Joe’s.
145. Labor.
146. Cycling.
147. Walking.
148. Riding the bus on Spare the Air Day.
149. Lying down in first rain.

Carlo Alcos

150. My ears
151. My eyes
152. My nose
153. My sense of touch
154. My wife
155-157. Our freedom, resourcefulness and health to travel where an when we want
158. All the animals of the earth. Can humans please stop thinking we are above them? And realize that we are all part of the big picture?

Debi

159. I am grateful for… my health above all; it is my army in life.
160. My blessings and good fortune.
161. My beautiful, healthy, intelligent son.
162. My husband’s health and love.
163. My strong, intelligent, hard working, healthy parents who made my great life possible.
164. The support, trust and loyalty of friends and family.
165. That everyone gets home safe everyday from school and work.
166. The best cafe au lait every morning, better than in any coffee shop, made at home.
167. I am grateful for the peace within.
168. Also for the peace that surrounds me; I live in a stable environment, untouched by war or ravaged by corruption and evil.
169. Daydreams, and the fact that I remember night dreams to analyze them, which helps me solve some of the problems that come up in my life.
170. Long hot showers on a cold day.
171. Cold showers on hot summer days.
172. That I live in a part of the world with 4 seasons.
173. I am grateful for the fact that I take nothing and no one for granted, and I am conscious of this from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep.
174. The evolution in my own life.
175. Chocolate
176. Croissants
177. Days on the beach
178. Staying toasty warm indoors on cold winter days
179. Another day
180. My hyperawareness of everything around me, I smell the flowers and the coffee, breath in the fresh air and I’ve always been at one with life like this – it’s a blessing to add to all the blessings.
181. I just love brushing my teeth and that clean feeling!
182. Listening to all kinds of commercial free music on satellite radio.
183. And so much more, I could be here writing a book….:-0

Alan Velasco

184. Toilet Paper
185. Laughter
186. The awesome feeling of walking into an air conditioned building in the summer.

VagabonderZ

187. Coming home after a few drinks with friends and finding Revenge of the Nerds on the telly. “No one is really free until nerd persecution ends”

Eva Holland

188. Staying up too late laughing with my mom.
189. Jumping the fence at the football stadium late at night (in high school) and climbing up to the highest row.
190. Rollerblading by the Ottawa River.
191. Full moons.
192. Walking the boardwalk at Halifax Harbour after dark, and hanging out by the tugboats.
193. Free samples at the bagel shop.
194. Snow angels.
195. Snow forts.
196. Snowball fights. (Got winter on my mind…)
197. Thunderstorms.
198. My friend’s fat cats falling asleep on my legs.
199. Long walks, wherever I am.
200. Good conversations with strangers – on trains, planes, in hostels, wherever.

MountainJedi

201.Receiving a hug and a kind note from a friend, unbidden.
202.Tabula rasa
203.Belonging and not belonging all wrapped up into one.

Becky

204. Slow dancing in the kitchen with my boyfriend
205. Hellos
206. Sand in between my toes
207. Holding hands
208. Diving into the same book twice because it’s that good
209. Naps in the park
210. People watching after New Year’s and Halloween
211. Dreaming
212. An ample amount of dehydrated marshmallows in my hot chocolate
213. Every Tuesday when the florist brings in a new flower arrangement
214. Surprises
215. Summer nights
216. Uncontrollable laughter
217. Kisses
218. The smell of burning candles
219. Memories
220. Love stories
221. Hugs
222. Running into an old friend
223. Loving and being loved
224. Productive days
225. Lazy days
226. Sharing
227. Complements
228. The smell of fries
229. Sex
230. My beautiful family
231. My forever friendships
232. Waking up next to Ben
233. Stretching in the morning
234. The job I have
235. The house I live in
236. Smothering myself in warm towels
237. Movies in the park
238. Sunsets
239. The smell of fall
240. My health
241. Sleepovers with my younger siblings
242. Music…im so thankful for the sound,lyrics, and meaning!

Abram

243. Playing basketball.
244. Beautiful women.
245. Good friends.
246. HBO’s “The Wire”.
247. Sleeping in.
248. Home cooked meals.
249. My girlfriend’s smile.
250. The internet.
251. A good book.
252. Being alive.

rebeccacate

253. Hugging and holding my grandchildren.
254. Waking up in the morning.
255. Sunshine.
256. Not answering to a boss (retirement).

Sarah Menkedick

Not sure how the numbers are going here, but I figure the more free things to be grateful for, the better, so I’ll start at 236:

236. the smell of pine trees
237. reading a book on a park bench all afternoon
238. finishing a project and feeling a rush of exhausted satisfaction
239.. the way my dog “shakes” by slamming her paw down on my palm
240. the feel of a hot shower after a long run
241. the ache and burn of my muscles after a long run
242. the first sip of coffee in the morning in the breeze from the open window
243. my husband and the way he and the dog are my family
244. my family
245. the taste of rajas made by Oaxacan nuns
246. fetching with the dog at sunset on the Cerro Fortin
247. the smell of winter in Ohio
248. the smell of summer in Ohio
249. the woods
250. rain

jetsettin

281. Trees and flowers
282. My kitten
283. Nature and wildlife
284. Art and music
285. My books
286. My intellect
287. Discovering my coaching, teaching, and leadership abiliity
288. My writing ability and other artistic abilities
289. Being able to be a part of my niece and nephew’s lives
290. Trips taken to the UK.
291. Writing for Travel-Writers-Exchange.com and Baja-Fun.com; was given the chance to showcase my writing talent; someone took a “chance” on me and believes in me.
292. Developing confidence and self-esteem; believing in myself even if no one else does
293. Moving to AZ — hiking the mountains
295. Waking up from unconsciousness — was sleepwalking through my life
296. Meditation
297. The ability to workout

Adventure Kid

298. A deep breath of clean foreign air while looking out across the Alps.

marisateschl

299. the smell of the earth after it’s rained
300. using a bag you last used when on the beach and finding sand and a postcard you never finished writing in it

Anonymous

281 Water pressure
282 My job
283 My brother
284 My independence
285 A thumbnail moon

aki.claire

301. Smiles
302. Legs to walk
303. Internal photographs
304. Love!
305. Laughter.
306. All the lessons you’ve learned by helping other people.
307. The feeling you get when a friend cheers you up
308. Knowing that the sun will rise soon
309. Seeing shooting stars from your rooftop
310. Watching the transition from day to night.
311. Puffy clouds.
312. Seeing the pale green buds sprout in the spring.
313. The caressing of cherry blossom leaves caught in the spring breeze.
314. The help of a complete stranger.
315. The dreams that motivate me.

Tinydancer

316. Discovering just how many different kinds of sunsets there are
317. Reunions with best friends, no matter how short the time passed
318. Falling asleep to the sound of waves crashing
319. Having been in love
320. Hope of a new, different love
321. Random encounters with strangers on my bus
322. Knowing my opinion is valued at work

daniellas

323. Fresh coffee in the morning
324. Laughing to tears with my sister
325. Finding magical places in my neighbourhood
326. Freshly washed bedlinen
327. Sea breeze in my face
328. Watching Amelie again and again
329. Getting things done and being proud of myself for doing that
330. Falling in Love
331. Charlie playing the piano on a sunny morning under a beautiful tree
332. Cooking with my friends
333. Taking beautiful photographs
334. walking and laughing
335. Nature
336. The feeling of freedom

trader

337. Brushing your teeth on the beach, looking out over the sea and the mountains on the opposite side of the bay reflecting the sun which has not yet reached you.
338. Reading poetry to the waves while standing on the bow of a traveling boat.
339. The burn in my legs as I climb the slope of a mountain too steep to descend and the knowledge that another way must be found.
340. The subtle realization of true happiness as I sit at a plywood desk in a remote cabin, accompanied only by a notebook and a pen.

jclum3

341: the smile you get after traveling 5,000 miles to see the woman that you love.

vera alves

342. Tulips
343. Talking to friends and not noticing time passing
344. My family’s love and support
345. Hugs
346. Closing your eyes while lying on the beach
347. Knowing that, no matter how long it takes, I’ll hug my family again
348. Making plans
349. Reading a book and loving it so much you don’t want to get to the last page
350. Fresh sheets
351. Postcards or letters from friends

vapintar

352. That I always have a family to return to
353. Forgiveness
354. That laughter really is the best medicine
355. That things do change, for the good, the bad, the in between
356. That all these people have written posts
357. The simple things
358. People who believe in me
359. Hope
360. Love
361. Smiling is catching
362. Potatoes

Apocalisp

363. High Fives – Seriously try and be sad during a high five, it’s impossible

elizabeth.zito

364. The warmth of my dog when she curls up next to me every night.
365. The things I learn each day
366. Always having the option of WALKING.
367. When hands touch
368. The fact that my mom still gets upset that I don’t let her do my laundry when I visit home.
369. Imagination
370. How happy my roommates are
371. The fact that people cannot hear rhythm without subconciously tapping, dancing, moving in time.
372. Youtube. Just sayin’.
373. The way Pennsylvania smells in September
374. What this painting conveys: http://jerseystylephotography.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/masterbedroom.jpg

hungrytravel…

375. Riding downhill on a bike
376. Vintage performances on Youtube (James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Soul Train Lines)

Ryukyu Mike

377. Sea breeze

Joanna Haugen

378. Mornings where I can sleep in.
379. Mornings where I get up early to walk my dogs before anyone else is up.
380. Quiet.
381. Imagination.
382. Skies dark enough to see all the stars.
383. Sunshine.
384. Spending time with people I love.

Photo by sskennel

THERE’S NO DOUBT the world keeps getting weirder. As always, what matters is how you respond, which as Hunter S. Thompson indicated, means “going pro,” getting paid somehow to jump ass-first into the river.

This isn’t, as they say, without sacrifice, which for me has meant among other things, being away from friends and family and querencias (Southern Appalachian Mountains) during this time of year. For the past decade I was either traveling or living out West, and when November came I’d invariably look at the cloudforest or the aspens and see instead the white pines and tulip poplars (with predictable leaves-floating-down scenario) I was missing back home. In stronger moments of reflection (depression) I could actually smell smoke / hear rivers flowing.

For the first few years of exile my Jewish guilt was also cranked up in the mix. Lord I wouldn’t be there again for the Thanksgiving family roll-call! (Plus pop quiz on college / career trajectories with and bonus exam on any gadget, clothing, and vehicle purchases.)

Certainly I wasn’t thinking about the food which had taken a severe nosedive over the years (butterball), an inverse function of our family’s levels of affluence. This unfortunately is the general trend vís-à-vís time spent cooking versus the default mode of ‘ordering,’ however, it should be noted that my mom’s pumpkin bread and Momo’s gravy always delivered.

I can’t pretend that on some levels the guilt isn’t still there (‘hardwired’ as the phrase goes), or if not guilt then just a feeling of ‘damn, I wonder how everyone is.’ Is it enough then, for me to celebrate Thanksgiving like this, remembering them, writing about them, all the way down here in Patagonia?

I wonder what Uncle Rob, himself an inimitable pro (who ended up moving to Hawaii, where, now that I think of it, I could totally see a Thanksgiving feast of wild pig someday) might say. He’d probably just want to see Layla, and maybe later throw the football, as good a response as any.

In a call last night with TV producer Misty Tosh and Matador jefe Ross Borden we tried to describe that element in Matador that inspired us the most, and somehow locked onto the phrase “people breaking free,” perhaps another way to verbalize what Hunter S. Thompson was advocating.

Yesterday a family of Mapuche Indians stopped me in the street (addressing me, damnit, as Usted Señor) and asked me if I lived here. I realized that as of 3 days (long enough for me to stop pulling in on the front gate to go out) this was technically true.

I didn’t know the address they were looking for, but for a few seconds I was somehow both in the scene and watching it from somewhere else (that future place you go in your mind when you think ‘I’ll write about this?’) as the old man pointed through the rain and said he’d heard it was más p’allá.

Of course this scene shouldn’t ‘stand for’ anything more than itself, as this way of thinking has led people to do weird and evil shit (like decimate the very people who helped them survive their first seasons after arriving in the Americas, then set up a national holiday “giving thanks”) since the beginning of time. This was just one man asking another for directions as has happened and will continue to happened in stadiums and forests and bus terminals and above rapids and in muddy streets everywhere in the world forever.

Try to ‘draw out’ this direction-giving into a spiritual thing or a religion or anything else and you’ve gone from pro to amateur. Keep it at ground level and just give the man directions or smile and tell him you don’t know but you’re sure he’ll find it up there más p’allá.

Community Connection

Going back through the archives the other day I realized the Notebook has now been around just over 2 years. I think from the very beginning, helping people go pro was part of the vision. Giving people info and stories. Of course you still have to make the jump yourself.

And if you’re still at home, offer to help this year in the kitchen. Learn a recipe from your mom. Then go write about it. Happy Thanksgiving.

THE BOTTOM LINE is this: in today’s media revolution, each moment seems to bring yet another opportunity for citizen journalists, backpack filmmakers, travel writers, and virtually anyone with a creative vision and a willingness to find and document interesting stories.

One of the central tenets we teach travel writers at MatadorU is that to publish, it’s necessary to develop a “publication mindset.” In other words, to look at publishing not from the perspective of a writer but from that of the person receiving your work.

With this in mind, look at how YouTube’s new platform YouTube Direct is going to facilitate the search for and incorporation of user-generated content like yours for media websites around the world:

Knowing this, ask yourself how you can develop your portfolio, presence, and reach as a citizen journalist or filmmaker. Here are several resources to help get you started, or to build on knowledge you already have:

*4 Tips for Shooting Better Travel Videos
*How to Use Voice Over to Tell a Story
*Tips for Travel Video: The Elements of a Story
*Citizen Journalism Publishing Standards [A straight up guide to the elements journalistic storytelling for those with little or no training.]

Community Connection

How do you plan on utilizing the continually unfolding opportunities for citizen journalism? And for editors of media sites: what is your experience so far with YouTube Direct?

Please share your comments with us below.

Photo: Rutger de Moddertukker

IF YOU HAVEN’T HEARD YET, new FTC guidelines will be going into place beginning Dec. 1. These guidelines include, among other things, a mandate on disclosing any and all paid sponsorships or endorsements.

From the FTC Guide:

“The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. . . . Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

While many bloggers such as Marty Dickinson are bemoaning the impending regulations, some of us in the travel writing are looking at them as a step in the right direction. With full disclosure now being federally mandated, there seems to be more of a chance that current industry policies forbidding travel writers from taking comps will be revised, giving travel writers more freedom in looking for / accepting stories, and perhaps more to the point, earning a living.

How you answer Dickinson’s question about the regulations–”why would it be important for people to know that you’re getting a commission payment for a referral?” will probably determine how you feel overall about the issue.

The point is less about money and more about about transparency. After looking at this issue (or at least trying to) from all sides, I came up with a manifesto of sorts called Material Transparency.

I argued that bloggers and writers not only embrace the impending FTC regulations on material connections, but expand the concept into an overall aesthetic of transparency in their other connections, their crew, their companies, all as a way of defining and helping exhibit / promote their personal brand.

In what ways, if any, will these upcoming regulations affect your work as a writer or blogger? Please let us know in the comments below.

Photo by a song under the sugar sugar

YOU DON’T MISTAKE travel writing for punk rock. Most of it just isn’t loud or raw enough. Publicly, at readings, travel writers tend to restrain themselves from smashing the podium or lighting shit on fire.

The process of creation itself (and the audience’s reception) is generally an ass-to-chair kind of deal, often with food and / or beverages nearby [writing these lines with a tomato and cheese sandwich + coffee in a cafe in Santiago].

Finally, as Chuck Klosterman observed, anytime punk rock tries to explain or justify itself, it’s finished. By contrast, most travel writing seems to be, at least on some level, a way for the writer to explain or justify whatever trip he or she is on. That’s the basic gig.

Still, I’d like to imagine a scenario where travel writing was 100% punk. Where you were all-out free to write anything about anyone or anyplace in any style you wanted, free to investigate and write the stories of what’s going on in say, the cruise ship industry, only from a deckhand, not a passenger’s point of view. Or with the Kalahari Bushmen. Or maybe the fucked up lady that lives right above you in your building.

The fact that we all actually have this freedom but so few of us choose to exercise it is partly a reflection, I’m guessing, on human nature (paraphrasing Saul Bellow: “We get as much truth as we have courage to ask,”) and part straight up bitch-slapping economics.

There appears to be no dearth of paying markets for stories that lend themselves to advertising, but far fewer options (and certainly far less sustainable options) for writers going after stories on people and their relationship with place, which, to me anyway, is what travel writing is. As Jim Harrison wrote “How could we disappear into ourselves and forget our subject matter, the earth?”

Obviously I recognize the need for other kinds of writing (and have actually enjoyed having a copy down here of the Fodor’s Patagonia that Tim Patterson and I contributed to last year).

But most of all I’m interested in reading the stories people write not out of a need to accomplish or get paid but just out of a raw need to tell the story. And unless or until someone is out there writing / editing / and publishing their work in real time as they’re getting shot at in Iraq or patrolling the mountains in Afghanistan, I guess that’s as close to punk rock that we as travel writers can get.

15 Vital Matador Narratives

So all of this blathered, I asked around our crew what we should include in a list of travel stories published at Matador which are the most punk rock, the ones that seem to keep reverberating:

- 8:46am, 9/11 Manhattan

- Huayhuash: A Convergence of Change and Resilience

- Notes on Los Pitayeros

- My Chinese Clown

- Another End of the Road: (Still) Searching for Surf in Centroamerica

- Carnaval. Darkness.

- What would you give for your traveler’s moment?

- The Ringer

- Golden Trout

- My Hometown in 500 Words: Lagos

- Wrestling, Pig Skin, and Beer

- Birth of Layla Miller

- Growing up in East Germany

- Notes on Not Being Able to Pray at the Wailing Wall

- Hiking the Chacaltaya Glacier

Community Connection

What and who are you reading? Who is producing vital travel narratives right now–either famous or unknown?

Feature photo and photo above by the_toe_stubber.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m a total beginner when it comes to photography. I have virtually no skills. I’m totally humbled when I see someone’s work like Trey Ratcliff or Matador’s own Lola Akinmade.

That being said, I feel like I do have an appreciation for form, composition, color, and a good idea of how to select an image for a story I’m writing or editing. Basically, I think like a writer. What I’m looking for are pictures that tell a story. This shot above is a good example. [Original photo link.]

In trying to learn more, I thought I’d share what I like about this picture, what its narrative elements are, and then hopefully people with more skill / knowledge can add their expertise.

1. The setting and the subject are both specific and universal.

Where is this photo taken? I’m not sure, but it’s obviously an urban environment. From the reflection in the glass it seems like the woman is in front of a store, which, if you look in the background, might be a sex shop?

What’s important is that she’s not just ‘anywhere’, but in a specific and immediately recognizable place. This is also a key tenet of good travel writing: no matter what the storyline, the place itself is always underpinning everything. You should get (and ideally, ‘feel’) where the characters are as soon as you start reading.

Similarly, the emotions conveyed are specific to this woman, to her style, but are also familiar and perceivable to anyone. The way she is sucking on her cigarette, the look in her eyes: all of it seems to exude lasciviousness, fearlessness (or maybe feigned fearlessness?), defiance. Because it is so universally recognizable it all invites our imagining a story.

2. Every element in the image is balanced to create an aesthetic unity.

From the colors (the warm red of her sweater and pink bra of the woman [mannequin?] behind her, the cooler blues and greens of the wall) to the way her face in the foreground balances with the woman’s body in the background, everything seems to reinforce the overall aesthetic.

Similarly with writing, the best stories seem to do everything at once. The description flows into the plot which flows into dialogue which flows into the narrator’s reflections. Everything is balanced.

3. Subtle details keep leading your eye around the picture.

Pictures that tell stories make you want to keep looking at them and imagining more. The more I look at this image, the more I notice things like:

• She has one ear covered and one exposed.
• You see almost none of her body in the picture, whereas the model in the background is almost all body but with no face.
• Her hair looks like it hasn’t been combed very well, and she wears no makeup or jewelry.

The best stories have subtle and unexpected details throughout (and especially at the beginning and ending) that keep us moving along and leading us in new directions, ideally, adding more depth each time we go back and read.

Community Connection

What elements do you find in pictures that tell stories? And how can you apply this knowledge to your own photography? Please let us know in the comments below.