2012 Travel Writing Conferences

Spring and summer are fast approaching, and that means warmer days, Major League Baseball and, yes, travel writing conferences. Gadling recently noted several upcoming conferences. Among them:

Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX)
The annual travel blogger gath…

NATJA Announces 2011 Winners

The complete roster of North American Travel Journalists Association award winners was announced this week. National Geographic Traveler took the grand prize for top travel publication, while Andrew McCarthy and Jill Schensul were named the travel jour…

Looking for the Old Hippie Trail

At Old World Wandering, Iain Manley has a long, worthwhile post on the classic overlander, mixing his personal experiences as a “novice traveller” on the route with a history of the trail’s literature, from “Across Asia on the C…

Video: Eric Weiner on his new Book, ‘Man Seeks God’

We recently published The Inner Nightclub of Everlasting Joy, an excerpt from Eric Weiner’s new book, Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine. Here’s Weiner discussing the book and his travels with Lisa Napoli earlier this month at a …

‘Afterglobe,’ ‘Ingesticulate’ and 28 Other New Additions to the Travel Lexicon

Andy Murdock has been brainstorming some much-needed new travel words. For instance, “comeuppants,” a noun for those times when “an obnoxious person loses their luggage and has no change of clothes.” Or “trambunctious,&#82…

The Rumpus Talks Truth in Memoir

This is a favorite, much-kicked-around topic of mine, as relevant to travel writers as to more stationary memoirists. Earlier this week the folks at The Rumpus added a fresh contribution to the debate.

Messing With Memoir is an essay about the author…

Shit Travel Bloggers Say

I guess this was inevitable, given the wildly popular meme. My room is comped, right?

What’s the Etiquette for Abandoning Ship?

As we’ve heard, the evacuation of the Costa Concordia didn’t go well after the ship ran aground last week off Italy. Slate asks: What’s the etiquette for abandoning ship? Are there maritime laws that must be followed?

In short, yes. …

Audio From the Costa Concordia Disaster*

In this newly released audio, the Italian Coast Guard appears to order the Costa Concordia captain back on board the ship after it ran aground Friday off Italy. According to the latest Cruise Critic report, 11 people have died and 24 are still missing….

What’s in a Long Sentence?

Apparently some copy editors have taken issue with Pico Iyer’s use of long sentences. In the Los Angeles Times recently, the World Hum contributor makes an eloquent case for them (while employing them often), explaining that he uses them “a…