COLUMN #58, 14 August, 2002
How I became a travel writer | Don George

Every week I get an email or two that reads something like this: 'I love to travel, I love to write and I want your job - when are you going to retire?' Well, no, they don't go quite that far. But they do say, 'I want to do just what you do - how did you become a travel writer?' I'm especially mindful of this question right now, I suppose, because this week I'll be teaching at the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference, and I expect many of the students will be asking the same thing. So here's the answer.

The story begins in the spring of my senior year at Princeton. At a time when I was supposed to be wandering blissfully under the Gothic spires and magnolia blossoms, squeezing every last hedonistic drop out of my undergraduate career, I was racked with indecision. What was I going to do with my life? The only thing I truly knew was that I had no idea what I wanted to do. Everything in my experience had channelled me towards becoming a professor - 16 years of having teachers as role models can do that to you - but something inside resisted that scenario.

So I was exploring my options. I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship to study in England and a Fulbright Fellowship to study in France and then I found out about something called an Athens College Teaching Fellowship, which was awarded every year to four graduating US college students. That fellowship supplied room and board and a small stipend, and the fellows taught English classes at Athens College, an exclusive prep-school-cum-junior college in an Athenian suburb. I applied for the fellowship. That was my first great step.

I won, and set off to Greece via a summer in Paris. As it turned out, my fellowship duties were to teach five hours of literature and writing classes a week, and to help in writing speeches for the college president and in writing and editing articles for the school's alumni magazine. Pretty arduous, eh? This left me great gulps of free time, which I filled exploring Aegean beaches and ruins, and winter and spring vacations during which I wandered wide-eyed around Italy, Turkey, and Egypt. It was the most exhilarating year of my life.

But the months sped by, and all too quickly the Big Question loomed again: What was I going to do with my life? I applied to a number of graduate programs in comparative literature, but to hedge my bets, I applied to a few creative writing graduate programs as well. When I was accepted into both, I wrestled with indecision again for a few weeks. Then, after one long Athenian night listening to my soul, I decided to reject the professor I had been programmed to become and to embrace the poet I was just learning to love: I decided to follow the writing route. That was my second great step.

I entered an intensive one-year Master's program in a small school in Virginia called Hollins College. Hollins was a sublimely schizophrenic school: The undergraduate part was an exclusive, old-style, all-female Southern institution whose atmosphere retained much of the finishing school feel; the graduate part consisted of just two programs, one in psychology and the other in creative writing, both co-educational, and both intimate, innovative, rigorous and altogether excellent - just what I needed to make the transition from cocktail party poet to practicing writer. I lived in a log cabin on a lake and wrote a collection of poems, a few desultory chapters of a novel, and a description of an impromptu expedition I and a traveling companion had made up Mt Kilimanjaro the summer after my stay in Greece.

That year whizzed by, too, and as winter thawed into spring, the BQ loomed again. Still dazed with indirection, I looked around and realized that I knew nothing of huge portions of the world - all of Asia, for example; I barely knew the difference between China and Japan. Miraculously, Princeton had a fellowship program especially designed for such benighted individuals. It was called Princeton-in-Asia and it sent young people to countries from Japan to Indonesia for two years. I was the most ignorant of all the applicants, so I got to choose wherever I wanted to go. I chose to teach at International Christian University in Tokyo. That was my third great step.

I went home to Connecticut for the summer, and a couple of months before I was to depart for Japan, wrote earnest letters to numerous East Coast magazines saying that I was going to live in Tokyo for two years and would be pleased to be their Japan-based correspondent. The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Time and many others wrote back saying thank you very much but actually we have a few people based in Japan already. Astonishingly enough, however, editors at the New Yorker, Travel & Leisure and Mademoiselle added notes saying that if I was planning to be in New York before I left for Japan, they would be happy to meet with me.

So I immediately invented a trip to New York and wrote back saying thank you very much for your note and in fact I am planning to be in New York from x to y and as you suggested I would love to stop by and meet you and when would be convenient for you? I met with editors at the three magazines, and as part of each visit, I handed over a copy of my graduate school piece on climbing Kilimanjaro as a writing sample. That was my fourth great step.

I went back to Connecticut, packed for two years in the Oriental unknown, and two weeks later went off to Japan. When I arrived at my campus apartment in a suburb of Tokyo, a telegram was waiting for me. It was from Mademoiselle and it said: 'Dear Don: A hole opened up in our November issue and we put your Kilimanjaro story in it. Hope you don't mind.'

Hope you don't mind! Up until this point all I had to show for a decade of writing was a half dozen clippings from the Princeton newspaper, a few illegible mimeographed 'literary magazines' I'd received as payment for published poems, and a neat stack of rejection notes from Poetry, Antaeus, and especially the poetry editors at the New Yorker. The closest I'd come to publication were two tiny beige New Yorker notes I'd taped to my wall. On one a kind editor had scribbled in pencil, 'We rarely comment, but we do read with care.' And on the other some editor had scrawled in pen - 'Sorry we can't use these, but do keep trying.'

Now I'd written one travel article in my entire life and it was about to be published in a glossy national magazine. And I was going to be paid hundreds of dollars for it! Let's see: Poetry - ten years - stack of rejection notes; travel writing - one article - national magazine publication and big bucks. Maybe there was an alternative to writing poetry...

Fast forward two years. I'd traveled to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. I'd continued to write poetry but I'd also begun keeping copious travel journals and writing long letters and absorbing as much raw material as I could. I'd had two articles published in the inflight magazine of Japan Airlines and a couple more accepted by other Asia-based magazines; and I'd been given an assignment by Travel & Leisure - that had two weeks later been abruptly withdrawn and re-assigned to a much more famous writer. Most important, I was beginning to frame the world through a travel writer's mind, beginning to compose my travels into tales.

I returned to the USA and decided to give myself a year to make a real beginning as a freelance writer. By the end of that year I'd published a couple more articles in inflight magazines, but my career had not taken flight, so I moved to Berkeley, where I'd gotten a summer job teaching English to foreign students at the UC Berkeley extension. One August afternoon when that program had just ended and the BQ was again looming, I decided on an impulse to visit Japan again. But how? Well, I was a writer and I knew Japan. Maybe I could get Japan Airlines to fly me to Japan so that I could write articles.

Sure, sure, you're thinking. Well, I was innocent enough not to know better.

So on a Friday morning I walked into the office of Japan Airlines in San Francisco, where I met with a very kind woman who was the office manager. That was my fifth great step.

I told her about my background and asked if the airline ever flew writers to Japan so that they could write articles. 'We don't organize trips like that,' she said, 'but you should go to the office of the Japan National Tourist Organization in Japantown. In fact, you should go right now, as soon as you leave this office. Go right away and talk to Mr. Ryuji Yamakawa.'

I didn't know why there was such an urgency in her words, but I headed immediately to the JNTO office, where I met with the very gracious Yamakawa-san. He asked me many questions about my time in Japan and my writing, and seemed especially impressed when I told him that I'd recently submitted an article on Japan to the San Francisco Examiner Travel Section.

By the time our talk ended, it was about 3pm. He said, 'Can you come back at 5:00?'

I said of course I could, but I had no idea why and was too intimidated to ask.

I wandered nostalgically around Japantown for a couple of hours and showed up at a few minutes to five. Yamakawa-san welcomed me into the office and bade me sit down. Then he looked at me intently. 'Don-san, would you be able to go to Japan on Monday?'

Japan? On Monday? My life flashed before my eyes. Of course I could! But how? Why? Over beers he explained that a press trip of travel journalists was all set to leave for Japan that coming Monday. All the tickets had been bought and all the hotel reservations and other arrangements had been made. That morning, about an hour before I'd walked through the Japan Airlines door, Yamakawa-san had received a distressed phone call from the travel editor of the Oakland Tribune, saying that something terrible had come up and he was going to have to pull out of the trip.

And then I had walked in.

So I flew off to Japan with a jovial flock of five veteran travel writers and editors, whom I amused no end with my awed reaction to the treatment we were getting: lavish banquets, special tours of temples and audiences with artists and dignitaries. We returned to the States, but I'd gotten a glimpse of a life that now seemed more alluring than ever. The only problem was: how to get from here to there?

In the meantime, I needed money, so I got a job as a TEFL teacher at the University of San Francisco and renewed my resolve to write freelance articles on the side. Then, a couple of weeks before I was to begin teaching, I gathered my courage and called the legendary travel editor at the San Francisco Examiner, Georgia Hesse, about that Japan article I'd submitted, the same article that had seemed to impress Yamakawa-san so. That was my sixth great step.

She answered the phone herself, and for a moment I was speechless. Then I sputtered, 'Ms Hesse, you don't know me, but my name is Don George and I sent you an article two months ago about Kyushu, and I'm just wondering what the status of the article is.'

I'll never forget her response. 'I don't know anything about your article, but I'm very glad you called. I've just been talking with someone about you, and I'd really like to meet you.'

I just stared at the phone.

It turned out that Georgia had just decided to take a one-year leave of absence, and had called one of the journalists I'd met on the Japan trip to see if she might be interested in taking her place during that year. That writer had said that she was too busy, but that she had just met this nice young man who had recently moved to the Bay Area and who might be perfect for the job...

So the young man met the legend, and they hit it off. And then I met the publisher, and the editor, and the managing editor, and the nighttime janitor, and everyone in between, and after all these meetings, a week before I was supposed to begin teaching, Georgia Hesse called me and said, 'Would you like to take my place for a year?'

It was only a year, and anything could happen after that - but fireworks shot off in my head and the sun and the moon danced and I wandered drunkenly down the streets of my mind trying to comprehend the twisting course of life.

In one serendipitous swoop I had been transformed from a fledgling freelance travel writer to a Travel Writer for the San Francisco Examiner Travel Section, considered one of the top travel sections in the country. I didn't know it then, but writers who had been laboring for decades would have given anything for the job I had just stumbled into.

Later on I learned from Georgia that the publisher had been impressed by my Princeton degree and post-grad fellowships, the editor had been impressed by the fact that I was so well read and had named Peter Matthiessen and Paul Theroux as my favorite travel writers, the managing editor has been impressed by my Master's degree and my published articles in national and international magazines, and they all had been impressed by all the countries I had visited in my young years. What seemed like a fluke was actually the summation of every step I had taken along the way - but who could have known that at the time? All I had done was listened to a small still voice inside me, step by step...

And that's how I became a travel writer. I took a trip to Mexico and wrote two articles for the paper, then took another trip to the Caribbean and wrote a series of four articles. In between trips I helped edit the travel section with its other travel writer, the kind and pun-dacious Dick Alexander. Within the next year I had published articles in Travel & Leisure, Winds, Connoisseur and a number of other magazines, and I had started writing regularly for a late great magazine called Signature, edited by the equally legendary Horace Sutton.

As it turned out, the road had more twists and turns in store. Georgia Hesse decided not to return to the paper, and the Examiner launched a national search for her replacement, and when it was over, they decided to replace her with the Oakland Tribune travel editor, the man whose absence on that Japan press trip had catapulted my own career. When he joined the paper, I was (momentarily) unemployed. There were many more dips and twirls to come, but one thing was clear: My travel writing odyssey had begun...

So, to all those people who dream of having my job, my advice is to pull away from your keyboard, take out a map and follow your wanderlust to wherever it takes you. Heed that small, still voice inside and pursue your passion. In my experience, that's what will take you exactly where you want to be.



  posted by spidergrrl @ 6:37 AM