How to Land a Spot in the Best American Travel Writing Anthology

I’m sure Rolf Potts was at best surprised when he opened up the advanced reader’s copy of this year’s The Best American Travel Writing (2011), scanned the Contents page for his name and discovered no mention of himself whatsoever.

Also, Seth Stevenson.
Ditto, Jeffrey Tayler.
Too, Tony Perrotett.

Things could be worse. I didn’t even make the Notable Travel Writing runners-up page (but Joyce Carol Oates, Pico Iyer, and Ian Frazer did). Perhaps I was looked over for inclusion because the huge wad of online publications I sent to series editor Jason Wilson arrived at a “locked box.” Hm, I thought, “Is Jason giving me the silent treatment?” Boy, was I relieved to discover that the editorial op had just moved into new digs at Drexel University, also home of the cognoscenti-ruled website The Smart Set.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’ve met guest editor Sloane Crosley before at some budget beach resort somewhere: there is something familiar about those soulful eyes on the back cover.

At least, I’m sure, from reading her introduction, that she was sure she made the right choices: all the names looked familiar, but I have to admit the only real travel writer, included among the auteurs, was William T. Vollman, whose book The Atlas really was revolutionary in the literary travel world. When I first read his ambitious book, with its clashing Rorschach images, I wondered if he was some sort of computer-search collage artist. Upon closer inspection I realized he had typed in every single damned word, albeit under a delirium.

Unsurprisingly, Vollman’s “A Head for the Emir” (from Harper’s Magazine) is the standout essay, taking us into the unfamiliar territory of “Kurdistan”—an unstable unofficial nation bordering Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq.

Anyway, Sloane Crosley, author of the acclaimed I Was Told There’d Be Cake: Essays (which was a finalist for the Thurber Prize), can be congratulated for reintroducing us to authors not usually associated with travel magazines. André Aciman’s lead-off dream of following Monet to the villa in which he worked on the Italian Riviera is a hard act to follow. Until we get to Mischa Berlinski’s “Venance Lafrance Is Not Dead,” about the “loup-garou” (werewolves) in Haiti.

But even this is trumped by Téa Obrecht’s wonderful “Twilight of the Vampires,” about the Balkan vukodlak (vampire): “a far cry from that dirty, bloated wanderer of graveyards. . . . as a lover, he has worked hard to overcome his cadaverous locomotion, his ungainly south Slav diction . . . so that the mere sight of his fangs now inspires young maidens to bare their throats of their own accord.”

Other noteworthy reads include Maureen Dowd’s account of etiquette in “A Girl’s Guide to Saudi Arabia,” including “a Barbie-like doll, accessorized with headscarf and abaya.” Plus, Porter Foxes’s “The Last Stand of Freetown,” a wonderful take on the independent country of “Christiana” inside Denmark.

Other reliable tour guides into formulaic unfamiliar terrain include Gary Shteyngard’s comical “Moscow on the Med,” about the influx of pork-eating Russian Jews remaking Israel, and Justin Nobel’s frozen prose capturing “The Last Inuit of Quebec.”

However, it is Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Proulx’s elegiac “A Year of Birds” which casts the strongest spell. “One bald eagle was in the nest tree, the other flying down-river. The cliff turned the color of a russet apple, and I enjoyed the rare deep orange sunset smoldering under the edge of a dark dirty-sock cloud.” It doesn’t get any better than that, Proulx prose.

If I’ve left anybody out, this is not a comment on their worth for inclusion. Some of the stories are a little unsurprising, but not forgettable, including David Baez’s “The Coconut Salesman,” which I really liked mainly because it was short and sweet.

How to land a spot in the annual anthology The Best American Travel Writers (2012)? Just write for one of the major magazines such as Harper’s, Condé Nast Traveler, The Atlantic, Travel + Leisure, and The New Yorker. Or, a serious paperback literary magazine such as The Missouri Review. Alas, there are no surprise entries from experimental amateur zines inclus. Even so, I predict that I might have a surprise waiting for you in the next issue.

The Best American Travel Writing (2011)

Editor: Sloane Crosley
Series Editor: Jason Wilson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, pp. 255, $14.95
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Reviewed by John M. Edwards

John M. Edwards is an award-winning travel writer who has written for CNN Traveller, Missouri Review, Salon.com, Islands, The Expeditioner, and North American Review. He is editor-in-chief of the upcoming annual Rotten Vacations.

Blog of a Modern Nomad

Like Tangier for Twain, Aleppo is the spot we have been longing for all the time:

–The Innocents Abroad

click photo for slide show

I am a bit uncomfortable in my interactions, but it’s the uncomfortable I’ve desired. The vegetable vendors at the outdoor market are not used to selling their produce to foreigners, nor am I used to their Arabic, local prices, or bartering techniques.

I am uncomfortable most everywhere, in fact, and am probably naïve too. Maybe I’m being overcharged for my freshly-squeezed mango juice at the fruit stand, but I am too absorbed to give it a second thought.

My travel partner and I are so enthralled with this complete foreignness, the foreignness that Twain describes, and we haven’t even entered the old city and souks for which Aleppo is famous. Here, the new city is a novelty to us.

The first morning in Aleppo I awoke to the call to prayer. It echoed throughout the narrow streets and radiated up from the roof tops just as it had in all the other cities we had traveled through for the past two months. But this morning, it was a real person singing. In Turkey we were used to recorded prayers that sounded harsher than a worn-out 8-track tape from the 70’s. In Northern Cyprus I buried my head under the pillow at 4am. Even though my sleep was interrupted in Aleppo, I had still appreciated its beauty.

A few hours later, at about 9am, I heard church bells. At first I didn’t think it was possible. I hadn’t heard clanking bells since Bulgaria. But later I read that ten percent of the Syrian population is Christian and the secular government is tolerant of these different faiths.

Coming from modern and westernized Turkey, Syria seems so vastly different. It is both visually shocking and stimulating to the senses. To begin, everything is in Arabic. The first thing we had to do was learn how to read the numbers. (Arabs don’t use what we call “Arabic numerals”) Adding to this, Aleppean society is very conservative. Almost no women are seen on the streets without a headscarf and many are wearing the chador.

You won’t find international chains in Aleppo and there aren’t even supermarkets here. People still do their shopping in the souqs. The souqs are covered and still preserved from medieval times. In Aleppo you will come closer to experiencing a medieval city center better than anywhere else in the Middle East.

I am often in search of places that are “thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign” but with our shrinking and globalized world, these places are increasingly uncommon.

But in Syria, on the streets of Aleppo, I found Twain’s Tangier.

Stephen Bugno, August 2007