Travel Writing Post-Pandemic: A Creative Exploration

Read an excerpt here from the Palgrave Literary Journalism series book Re-thinking Travel Writing: The Journey of a Genre.

In this latest newsletter entry, I wanted to showcase the work that is coming from the Palgrave Studies in Literary Journalism series, edited by our own Sue Joseph, Willa McDonald and Matthew Ricketson. I also figured that it is time that I stopped hiding behind the newsletter and featured some of my own work. This excerpt comes from the book that my colleague Lee Mylne and I published in 2024 to take a closer look at the genre we have worked in, studied and taught for decades.

As Hannigan writes, the enthusiasm to be around travel is a sensation that he finds difficult to abandon, whatever the new awareness or impediment might be post-pandemic, “I would probably always want to write around travel, and to travel around writing”, and he finds comfort that the influential authors of his past such as Bruce Chatwin and John Mandeville first “existed within my head, because I read—and read hopefully. And if I could still be gone from a Greek hillside, away to Australia for a few hours on a hot afternoon, then I’d lost nothing”, and despite the later issues with truth-telling and perspective, they still exist for him in this space.

I am a travel writing optimist. Despite all the information to the contrary, I believe that there is a clear space for ‘new’ travel writing within our changing world to enrich our understanding of place and our position within it. This chapter explores the re-thinking of travel writing from a practical and creative position—how writers (and readers) can approach travel writing in a more hopeful, ethically aware and forward-thinking manner to ensure its continued relevance and importance.

Vertical Travel

The first exploration within this chapter is one which has understandably gained more traction since 2020. As Charles Forsdick et al. write in the 2021 Studies in Travel Writing special edition on vertical travel, “Thinking about travel in this way reveals the normativity of horizontalism, of long distances and of the expansiveness on which the practice customarily depends, all of which generate a set of assumptions that are often reflected in the travelogue itself”. The notion of vertical travel or looking closer at those places near-at-hand, does have relevance beyond the various lockdowns and isolation we have endured during the height of the pandemic, however. Historically, the first expansion of the idea of travel mobility for the masses came during the Grand Tour, which enabled well-heeled European travellers to go on religious and cultural pilgrimages from the seventeenth century onwards, thus opening tourism up to a much wider audience. This increased mobility was reflected through travellers and travel writers again and again throughout history, from the overland journeys from Europe to Asia in the 1960s and 1970s and the more recent expectation of school leavers to embark on a gap year of international travel and voluntourism.

With the increased awareness of our impact on the world: environmental, social and cultural, as well as the extended period of immobility due to COVID-19, the relevance of vertical travel as defined by Professor Michael Cronin as being, “the temporary dwelling in a location for a period of time where the traveller begins to travel down into the particulars of place either in space (botany, studies of micro-climate, exhaustive exploration of local landscape) or in time (local history, archaeology, folklore)”, is also now poignant in a contemporary sense. Cronin also relates the two different modes of travel—deep or cursory—to the languages we understand and interpret as travellers and writers, and the sub-languages we are exposed to as a result of looking around us and within our environments more thoroughly (slang, local customs and slow travel). He writes that we should consider this before venturing across the globe in search of adventure, encounters with the “other” and cultural immersion far from the places we live, as there is real value in appreciating these experiences and ‘sub-languages’ close to home.

The awareness of vertical travel originally comes from the late eighteenth century, when Xavier de Maistre produced what has become one of the most popular ‘original’ texts of vertical travel. De Maistre wrote A Journey Around My Room in response to the six weeks house arrest he endured in Turin for being caught fighting a duel at the beginning of the French Revolution. De Maistre took this as a creative challenge and, along with his dog Rosine, he wrote a ‘travel book’ inspired by the items around him. He would travel imaginatively and through memory to attempt to transport the reader along with him during his incarceration.

What a comfort this new mode will be to the sick; they need not fear bleak winds or change of weather. And what a thing, too, it will be for cowards; they will be safe from pitfalls and quagmires. Thousands who hitherto did not dare, others who were not able, and others to whom it never occurred to think of such a thing as going on a journey, will make up their minds to follow my example.

At the end of his ‘trip’, de Maistre is so enthused by the experience that he questions his sentence, “Was it to punish me that they had locked me up in my room—in that delightful country that holds every good thing, all the riches of life within its realm? You may as well exile a mouse in a granary”.

 In contemporary travel writing Joanne Lee sees close travel as a way for writers to attempt to “uncover hidden aspects of familiar places, often their native town or region”, and she uses the example of Italian writers reclaiming the travel narratives of their country through close travel so it obtains a greater sense of authenticity in response to the multiple Anglo-American travel accounts about Italy.

Forsdick continues the contemporary understanding of what this verticality means to travel writing, “Broadly understood in these terms, ‘vertical travel’ constitutes a general challenge to the topographical and environmental defaults with which many conventional forms of journeying are associated. Verticality contrasts and even clashes, therefore, with the horizontal axes often traced by travel narratives”. Considering the impact that we’re now aware that travel has it seems sensible to consider the creative approach first employed by Xavier de Maistre as we venture out into the world once again.

Alasdair Pettinger writes that this form of writing utilises two lenses, the idea of “proximate ethnography” focusing on the everyday nature of the places we visit, and the “deep mapping”, and intense concentration on places that outsiders would otherwise consider ordinary and not worthy of the travellers’ attention. This rediscovery of seemingly mundane or overlooked places is at the centre of both Cronin’s and Pettinger’s interpretations of the vertical rather than the horizontal and more conventionally tourism-oriented journey. Reflecting on the prominence of vertical attention in a pandemic world, Forsdick et al. write, “Vertical travel extends also to the contemporary practice of urban exploration (UrbEx), journeying to heights and depths to gain new perspectives on the cityscape”. This creative means of looking closer at the notion of travel is seen in a variety of contemporary texts which can broaden our understanding of what travel writing can hope to achieve during its narrative exploration.

One of the most notable recent examples is from Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport (2010), where he spends a week ‘living’ inside the terminal at Heathrow in order to better understand this ‘purgatory’ place, its strange culture and something deeper of the lives of the people who pass through there. De Botton writes:

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go. The notion of the journey as a harbinger of resolution was once an essential element of the religious pilgrimage, defined as an excursion through the outer world undertaken in an effort to promote and reinforce an inner evolution.

In James Attlee’s Isolarion (2007) he writes an entire narrative about his suburban street in Oxford to challenge the reader, and the notion of why they travel and what the more significant meaning is, beyond ‘seeing the sights’ and engaging in an exotic and unfamiliar adventure. “I have to learn to travel more thoughtfully, to slip beneath the surface and explore more deeply. Space is relative. One aim of my pilgrimage will be to connect me to the neighbourhood in which I live”, he writes. Such books acknowledge the fraught nature of the travel writer who arrives from a Western country or culture to write about other people and their sophisticated cultures. Attlee’s book is also a creative response to travel writing’s long carbon footprint. This awareness is also seen with ‘travel’ texts which treat the notion of space and place differently, just as Scott Kelly’s Endurance (2017) does as he writes of his time travelling to and inhabiting the foreign lands of the International Space Station (ISS) as an astronaut. In Kelly’s text he details the physical and psychological experience of living for a year confined inside the ISS and the fact that the space station “doesn’t feel like an object. It feels like a place”, with its own personality.

Hannigan reinforces the potential of vertical perspectives when he writes that the state of travel writing post-COVID could see “an accelerated turn towards deeper engagement with narrower spaces”.

I have had a foot across the professional and academic fields of travel writing for some time. The opportunity to explore and expand on these ideas for this project has also reminded me where I have attempted to utilise some of these creative techniques to ‘narrow’ my own writing outputs. While I have practised my own close travel writing while stuck at home in 2020 and 2021 in the theme of de Maistre: walking the train tracks around the 5 km radius from my home, cooking dishes from countries I’ve visited, and escaping into the memories of the prints on my wall, this is also a technique I inadvertently utilised, in much the same manner as James Attlee, once the juggling of work, family and other commitments kept me grounded within my home state of South Australia just prior to the onset of COVID-19.

I realised that while I had previously ventured all over the world in search of stories while working for magazines and newspapers as a travel journalist, I had spent much less time exploring and researching the stories of where I lived. The prompt for my exploration of South Australia in the book The Crow Eaters came about accidentally after a weekend of winter gardening in my backyard, “The history of this place was in my hands, hiding just beneath the soil. I pulled up a curved lip of clay from beneath a tangle of old roots and wriggling worms; it was the edge of a brick”. The bricks were the remnants of an old brickworks factory dating back to the 1850s that used to operate where my house now sits.

It provided the motivation to explore further, while also echoing the creative ethnography technique of ‘chance encounters’ by Stephen Muecke who is guided by happenstance in his book Contingency in Madagascar (2012). With no initial intention of writing about where I lived, the overlapping of the creative and academic awareness within travel writing and the changes of emphasis emerging within the form were too strong to ignore. Here is how the exploration within my book began: “As I dig up flecks of clay and brick from my own backyard it prompts me to want to understand my surroundings—to do what de Maistre did in his bedroom and Chatwin did with the piece of skin, and to look closer”. From this point I travelled around my home state, meeting people, exploring history and place, and treating the place I lived as if I was a foreign tourist so as to give it the sort of close attention I wouldn’t have otherwise embraced.