Tom Swick: Expat Turned Travel Editor

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I think it’s helpful if a travel editor speaks another language. I think it’s extremely helpful if a travel editor has lived, not just traveled, lived in another country. Living in another country gives you a completely different perspective on a place. You have to study the language, you get to know the culture, and you really get beneath the surface of a place. And that’s invaluable. The experience colors all of your trips after that.

How would you define good travel writing?

I really like stories that have a human element. A freelancer wrote a story for me years ago about going to the Texas State Fair and breaking up with her boyfriend. It was a great story. You could read it and get information about the Texas State Fair, but you also had this wonderful human story of this couple coming to the end of their relationship.

I did an essay in 2001 where I listed the seven things missing from the traditional travel article: personal voice, point-of-view, people, dialogue, imagination, humor and, well, many travel articles are much too positive. Writers go out of their way not to mention anything negative.

People are always surprised to hear imagination on the list because lots of people think imagination is making things up, but it’s not. You use your imagination in how you describe something. You use your imagination when you write similes and metaphors. That makes a piece of writing more vivid.

And humor is also so important. Travel is one of the funniest things we do. You leave a place where you know how everything works and you go somewhere where you don’t have a clue. And it’s funny. People always come back from their trips and tell you about the funny things that happened to them, but writers don’t put them in their articles because they don’t think they are relevant. Often times they are not, but if you can use humor to illuminate your situation in someway, then it works great.

You get paid to travel, come home and tell people about your trip. People would love to have your job, but surely it has some drawbacks. What are they?

My biggest frustration is that I have limited amounts of time in each place. Sometimes I wonder, who am I to write anything about this place? What do I know? For example, I was in Bangkok last year and I was walking down the street and I was looking at these people sitting at sidewalk tables. They were all eating out of bowls and I had no clue what they were eating. I thought, how can I write about this place? I don’t know what these people are eating, let alone what they are thinking. And it’s times like these that I find myself riddled with doubt about my ability to convey anything interesting about a place.

But then I get home and I talk to people who’ve never been there. I start talking and I find there are things I know about a place that they didn’t know. And that’s when I realize I do have something to say.

When you travel for work, you usually travel alone. How do you cope with the loneliness that is bound to surface?

In a sense, you get used to it. It’s never pleasant, but it’s familiar. A book can come in handy, but usually I’m busy doing something. I can go days without having a meaningful conversation with anyone. After a few days of that, it does get depressing. You just want to talk to someone. You have to force yourself, especially if you’re shy, and I’m fairly shy, to go out and talk to people.

You mentioned books. Are there any books that really stand out in your mind as books that you’ve read on the road?

I spent four months in Greece teaching English and I was in this little town where there wasn’t much to do. The English school had a few books, a few classics, and I remember reading Gogol, the Russian. I read Dead Souls. It was a fantastic book, and I always associate that book with that time in Greece.

Someone once said to me: when you read and you travel and you meet other readers, no matter what nationality they are, you share a common language. And that’s so true.

I was in Turkey a few years ago and I was reading this book by Orhan Pamuk, who is a wonderful Turkish novelist. I was carrying one of his books around with me and I was staying in this hotel and I was the only guest there. There was a young woman that worked there and every morning when I came down for breakfast, she was reading a book. So I showed her my book, the book by Pamuk, and I asked her what she was reading. She was reading Gogol’s Dead Souls. We had this immediate bond.

When you’re traveling, you have a job to do. You have to collect information and produce an article when you get home. What is it like to meet fellow travelers on the road, like backpackers, who aren’t doing a job?

When I was younger and not a travel editor, I traveled alone, but I usually settled in a place. I spent a summer in London, four months in Greece, a year in France and two and a half years in Poland.

That year that I was in France, I saw lots of backpackers. In some ways, I envied them because they were usually in pairs and I was alone. But at the same time, because they were in pairs, I sometimes suspected they weren’t getting a real experience. They never seemed to settle anywhere, they were always moving on. I was spending a whole year in one place with a family, and I know that I had very edifying experience. I think I probably learned more. I still keep in touch with that family now, even 20 years later. We still have this connection.

But now, when I travel, I still run into backpackers. In many ways they make me feel like I am an amateur. They are traveling around for a year – especially Australians, that’s what they do, they go off and travel for a year. I’m just a rank amateur compared to them. Now, I just travel at most for three weeks.

Since you work for an American newspaper, you can’t always do stories about far-away places. Yet, many travelers think they can’t have a life-changing, true travel experience unless they get out of the country. Is traveling in the United States something you would encourage Americans?

Definitely. You can fly into any state capital, rent a car, drive around that state, and just be amazed at the things you come across. The thing about foreign travel is that you get to fly over an ocean. There is an excitement there that you just don’t have when you fly to Texas or California.

But that said, there is a great advantage to traveling in the U.S., and that is language. We understand everything. We understand idioms and jokes. For example, I flew to Philadelphia and I was sitting in the shuttle waiting to get my rental car and this one guy said to another guy, “He’s bustin’ your chops, huh?”

And I thought, what if some Frenchman had just come over here? This Frenchman probably speaks really good English, and he’s sitting in this shuttle van, and he hears this guy say, “He’s bustin’ your chops.” He’d have no clue what they were talking about.

American travelers, if they want to write, can write about America with a certain authority. You can often write more interesting things, more knowledgeable things, about your own country than you can about another country. And Americans are extremely loquacious. You start talking to most people in this country and they’re more than happy to bend your ear for half an hour. You can fill a notebook very quickly just driving around the country.

Where do you want to go that you think you could never convince the paper to foot the bill?

Hmmm. Well, there is one place. I have a friend there and he is urging me to come and I don’t think I could convince the paper to pay – Armenia. And I should clarify that a little. When I buy freelance stories, I don’t care where it’s about if it’s a good story. In fact, I have published stories about Armenia because they were good stories. But when I travel on the newspaper’s dime, I don’t pick places that I don’t think a fair number of my readers want to go. So that kinda' rules out Armenia.

I heard you say that you have never been to Alcatraz, which surprised me. Are there other places you’ve never been that people just assume you, the travel editor, have surely been to?

Yes … but I won’t admit them.

Kelly Westhoff is a freelance writer and teacher from Minneapolis. She is currently traveling around the world. Visit her travel blog at www.kellywesthoff.com.

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