Dear Friends,

Travel writing feels intimidating to me. It’s not as simple as going on a trip and writing about where you went, what happened, what you saw, who you met – although there are certainly elements of that in really great travel writing. I struggle with how to invite a reader to care about the mundane details, the texture of a place and its people, and to convey the enormity of the personal discoveries I made along the way. To fail at this kind of writing is to end up with something like those vacation slide shows a dull uncle or family friend made you sit through back in the 80s. With actual film slides in a carousel on a slide projector and a collapsable projection screen. The lights are off; the cooling fan whirs, puffing hot air into the room; the click ka-schunk of the advancing slides. The show was usually an interminable sequence of grainy scenes (in stunning Kodachrome) of people and places you probably didn’t fully comprehend the significance of. Maybe there were a few photos that piqued your curiosity, but they were quickly buried in the onslaught of images and the monotony of the hours-long event. So sleepy.

I have a dilemma. My family recently went on a multi-week trip to Spain and Portugal. It’s a trip I’ve been planning in the back of my head since the youngest of our children finished with diapers and nursing. I want to write about it! I feel the burden of this endeavor. One of the friends we went to visit, Kris, is a great reader and writer of travel writing. Like really good – funny, irreverent, poignant, authentic. He’s spent years writing about living in Spain as an American, as well as documenting many other excursions verging on benign misadventure. (I would link to his writing, but he’s a curmudgeonly luddite who makes zines and sends things through the mail – which I am also envious of, by the way.) I, on the other hand, typically write about walking across the street from my house to the meadow to look at birds and beavers. How am I supposed to capture a monumental but relatively brief and uneventful family adventure in old Europe? (I mean, it was eventful for us, but not the stuff of harrowing travel writing.) What should I do?

I could just upload a slide show and be done with it... the narrow medieval streets of so many Spanish towns, the severe cliffs of the Portuguese coast, the group selfies with cañas and tapas of pig ears and tortilla de patatas. I could upload a narrated slide show video and be done with it. I could scan and post pages (often illegible) from my sketchbook... half-formed platitudes contrasting American and Spanish culture, or goofy drawings of road signs and family members. I could select an esoteric photograph from my travels and write abstractly (poetically?) about its significance... say, how graffiti tags scrawled on ancient walls collapse time and space into a palimpsest of contiguous living (sorry). I could flashback – way back – to earlier travels as a young person, looking for a more oblique way into how I understand what this trip might mean for my kids... “when I was a junior in high school, our class trip through western Europe instilled a fascination with foreign travel that continues to this day” – blech. I could write a few thousand words about the storks. Or, I could get on with it, for fear that I’ve already lost you during the course of this exercise in external processing.

Any of the above ideas would probably be a productive place to begin my travel reflections, ruminations, and narratives. Ideas are cheap. The process and execution are the crucial factors in creative work. But, in stereotypical Spanish fashion, I say mañana, mañana. I’ll get to it tomorrow or next week or some day. I’m buying time. Better yet, I’m composting the whole big, jumbled, chaotic experience of maneuvering five people across an ocean, many time zones, planes, buses, taxis, through a few languages and countries, and back again. I’m not on deadline. No beat I’m responsible for. We’ll get there when we get there.

With delayed gratification and the promise of more to come,

Jeremy