<\/p>\n

Q&A with Nomad Rolf Potts, Author of <\/em>Marco Polo Didn\u00b4t Go There<\/p>\n

It is easy to forget that when it comes to \u201ctravel writing,\u201d traveling is the easy part. These days, anyone without the last name \u201cBin Laden\u201d can buy a plane ticket and go just about anywhere.<\/p>\n

But turning a trip into a compelling narrative that speaks to an audience as fickle as travelers in a way that packages reality into something readily digestible (deep breath), is where travel writing and great travel writing diverge. To execute great travel writing effectively requires an artist\u00b4s attentiveness. Like anything worthwhile, it involves hard work. Sometimes (cue Beethoven\u2019s 5th), it even requires getting a college degree.<\/p>\n

Now cue Rolf Pott\u2019s book Marco Polo Didn\u2019t Go There.<\/em><\/a> Open the pages and find a book that takes you from this corner to that corner of the globe via compelling narratives on a quality level that even few fiction writers inhabit. And fiction writers get to make shit up.<\/p>\n

As a traveler who has reported from over 60 countries, Rolf Potts understands that so much of a story depends upon how it is told. The book manages to inform without boring and inspire without being trite. The stories have a keen sense of place, juxtaposed with the author-admitted \u201cplacelessness.\u201d All this creates a pleasant unfolding of informed discovery.<\/p>\n

Potts tells his stories in such a way that at times you to feel like you are sitting in a bar over a beer listening as a fellow traveler exchanges tales. At the end of each chapter, Potts includes a commentary of endnotes that provide context and elucidation for each story. Much of these endnotes provide a window into Potts\u2019 writing process and cause the book to be just as relevant for aspiring writers wanting to improve their craft as it is for travelers seeking inspiration from “One of the finest travel writers working today” (Pauline Frommer).<\/p>\n

To expound on his book and travel vision, Rolf Potts fielded questions for The Expeditioner about his book and life as a vagabond. Marco Polo Didn\u00b4t Go There<\/a> <\/em>is available from his website<\/a> along with links to his essays and articles.<\/p>\n

The Expeditioner:<\/strong> Your intro mentions that some social critics say that \u201cReal\u00a0Travel\u201d is dead. I think your book is a sufficient rebuttal to this negative assertion. But why are such negative assessments out there?\u00a0Was there an \u201cideal\u201d time to be a traveler? Is it past or present?<\/p>\n

Rolf:<\/strong> I think it’s normal for people to fret that “real travel” might be\u00a0dead, especially as they get older, or as\u00a0society changes. The whole\u00a0“death of travel” issue has been debated for generations, and has gone\u00a0through countless variations. When railroads and steamships made travel faster and more efficient in the early nineteenth century, some\u00a0people claimed that this destroyed the kind of travel one experienced\u00a0on stagecoaches and sailing boats.<\/p>\n

When Thomas Cook started doing\u00a0continental group-tours for middle-class Englishmen around the same\u00a0time, the old aristocratic Grand Tour elite claimed that this ruined\u00a0the experience of travel in Europe. Other people claimed that “real\u00a0travel” ended with the Age of Exploration. In truth, real travel has always been an expression of the present\u00a0day.<\/p>\n

There are occasions when I’m tempted to think that travel was\u00a0purer before the ubiquity of smart phones and social networking (which\u00a0have a tendency to chain your travel experience to certain aspects of\u00a0home), but I have to remind myself that travelers have always made use\u00a0of whatever technology was available, and that I can’t base my\u00a0prejudices on how I traveled 10 or 15 years ago. I’d imagine travel\u00a0will always be “real”; serious travel writers just have to know how to\u00a0slow down and maintain their awareness, even as the manner in which we\u00a0travel changes.<\/p>\n

The Expeditioner:<\/strong> Your book is more than just a travel memoir, it offers a lot on the\u00a0subject of travel writing. You say that, \u201cWhen you enter into an\u00a0experience with the intention of writing about it, you tend to travel\u00a0the world more creatively and observe it more thoughtfully.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does the\u00a0expectation that you have to turn every trip into something someone\u00a0wants to read put a strain on your travel? Do you ever take a vacation\u00a0from this sort of travel and go somewhere deliberating deciding\u00a0you will not be writing about the experience?<\/p>\n

Rolf:<\/strong> I’d imagine the compulsion to turn all of one’s travel experiences\u00a0into narrative would be a strain, but it’s rarely been that way for me \u2014 at least when I’m out vagabonding. When you’re out wandering on\u00a0your own, in an open-ended way, the intention to write does make you\u00a0travel more creatively, but you always end up having far more\u00a0experiences than you could ever write about.<\/p>\n

In the year 2000, for\u00a0example, I spent nearly five months in the Middle East, and I wrote\u00a0about ten stories about the experience. Add those ten stories\u00a0together, and you’re only accounting for about two cumulative weeks of\u00a0that five-month experience. The rest was just general travel \u2014 experiences that were enjoyable (or perhaps on occasion dull), but not\u00a0worthy of a story. Traveling as a writer need not confine or overwhelm\u00a0your on-the-road experience; ideally, it just heightens your awareness and makes you bolder than you otherwise might have been.<\/p>\n

An exception to this is traveling on a short-term magazine assignment,\u00a0when you have something very specific to cover. In these situations\u00a0you have less of a chance to wander, and the dictates of your story\u00a0can be a bit of a strain sometimes. But these assignments can be great\u00a0for paying the bills and funding more open-ended adventures.<\/p>\n

The Expeditioner:<\/strong> At the end of each story in your book you provide a \u201cCommentary\u00a0Track\u201d of notes and clarifications. It made my job of writing\u00a0questions rather challenging, since you essentially answer most\u00a0questions and clarify doubts within the narrative itself.\u00a0What made\u00a0you decide to include this?<\/p>\n

Rolf:<\/strong> It’s something I always wished other nonfiction writers did when they\u00a0collected their stories and essays into book form. Any lived\u00a0experience is going to get reduced to the size of a story when it\u00a0comes time to write it, yet that doesn’t change the fact that so\u00a0many things happened in real life that would never fit into the story\u00a0itself.<\/p>\n

My endnotes are an acknowledgment that life is always bigger\u00a0and more complex than anyone’s ability to write about it. Any\u00a0nonfiction story is the result of a decision-making process that boils\u00a0the anarchy of moment-by-moment life into a narrative-sized chunk that\u00a0hopefully entertains and conveys meaning, and I wanted to give\u00a0readers a window into this process.<\/p>\n

The Expeditioner:<\/strong> Despite making my job harder, I appreciated your\u00a0commentary at the end of each story. It added a revealing dimension to\u00a0your writing that is rarely present. It showed that non-fiction\u00a0writing (specifically travel writing) sometimes needs a slight\u00a0reworking of reality make the story compact and digestible.<\/p>\n

It is\u00a0something that all writers do, but I think it is sort of seen as a\u00a0dirty little secret: don\u2019t ask, don\u2019t tell. How has the feedback been\u00a0in including a commentary of endnotes? Have you received any negative\u00a0criticism and if so what has been your response to it?<\/p>\n

Potts:<\/strong> People have appreciated the endnotes, especially aspiring nonfiction\u00a0writers, who enjoy the peek they can get at the inner workings of a\u00a0story. The few people who’ve been negative about the endnotes have\u00a0tended to be pretty naive in their assumptions about how stories work.<\/p>\n

When my book was reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle<\/em>, a website\u00a0commenter said something along the lines of, “Well I could be a\u00a0big-shot travel writer too, if I edited all the boring details out of\u00a0my experiences.”\u00a0I was kind of flabbergasted when I read that, because\u00a0everyone \u2014 not just nonfiction writers \u2014 edit out the boring details\u00a0when they tell stories. If you see a fight at a bar and you go home to\u00a0tell your roommates about it, you don’t start by describing the songs\u00a0that were playing on the radio on the drive over, or what brand of\u00a0urinal cakes were in the toilets, you cut straight to the most\u00a0relevant and dramatic parts of what happened. That doesn’t mean you’re\u00a0fictionalizing the events and details, it just means you’re sticking\u00a0to the most relevant ones.<\/p>\n

So the process of storytelling is invariably reductive \u2014 you have to\u00a0take all the details of what happened, and boil them down to the size\u00a0of a story. The catch here for non-fiction writers is that while you\u00a0can subtract, you cannot add events and details. You can skip over\u00a0certain things that did happen, but you can’t make up things that\u00a0didn’t happen. That’s when what you’re doing becomes fiction. As a\u00a0non-fiction writer I’m obligated to only include events and details\u00a0that happened, and my endnotes reflect that.<\/p>\n

The Expeditioner: <\/strong>Do you have a favorite travel story you\u2019ve written either in the\u00a0book or elsewhere?<\/p>\n

Potts:<\/strong> I’ll always have an affinity for “Storming ‘The Beach,'” since it was\u00a0my first big breakthrough story, and it opened the doors to so many\u00a0great writing opportunities. But that story was kind of a “stunt,” and while I love doing stunt-stories, they aren’t as emotionally\u00a0resonant as the stories that arise more organically.<\/p>\n

“Death of an\u00a0Adventure Traveler” has the strongest emotional association for me, not only because it deals with the disappearance of a man I deeply\u00a0respected, but also because it symbolizes so much about the kind of\u00a0travel that relatively privileged Western wanderers like myself often\u00a0overlook.<\/p>\n

I’m also keen on “The Art of Writing a Story About Walking Across\u00a0Andorra,” since it afforded me the chance to employ a meta narrative\u00a0technique to satirize the conventions of generic travel writing.<\/p>\n

The Expeditioner:<\/strong> What projects do you have in the pipeline?<\/p>\n

Potts:<\/strong> I’ll be pitching a new travel book to publishers this spring, the\u00a0details of which I probably won’t announce until it’s closer to\u00a0completion. When that book is finished I hope to get back to my\u00a0vagabonding ways for a bit \u2014 to just get back out into the world and\u00a0wander with no particular goal in mind.<\/p>\n

By Luke Armstrong<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

About the Author<\/strong><\/p>\n

Luke Maguire Armstrong lives in Guatemala directing the humanitarian aid organization, Nuestros Ahijados. His book of poetry, <\/em>iPoems for the Dolphins to Click Home About (available for sale on Amazon.com<\/em><\/a>) is especially enjoyed by people who “don’t read poetry.” (@lukespartacus<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Q&A with Nomad Rolf Potts, Author of Marco Polo Didn\u00b4t Go There It is easy to forget that when it comes to \u201ctravel writing,\u201d traveling is the easy part. These days, anyone without the last name \u201cBin Laden\u201d can buy a plane ticket and go just about anywhere. But turning a trip into a compelling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":10185,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2049,1,2585],"tags":[1021,2105,325,19],"yoast_head":"\n