Travel Writing Book & Workshop

I’ve finished the second edition of the Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Writing and shipped the manuscript off to Melbourne! Hooray! It’s a vastly expanded and updated edition, with much more information on the Internet — amazing how much that landscape has changed in just a few years — and more examples of great published [...]

Adventures in Reading

I was on KFOG Radio’s Morning Show earlier this week, and among the topics the hosts asked me to talk about was travel-related gifts for the holidays. I decided to focus on great books for travel lovers. Here are the five I recommended:
Sacred Places of a Lifetime, by National Geographic: a truly sumptuous and spiritual [...]

Adventures in Writing

I’m finishing up the second edition of the Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Writing, and in the course of doing my research, I’ve stumbled across the writings of Kira Salak. She is a truly extraordinary writer with the ability to bring a trip vividly to life and then to connect the significance of that experience [...]

Reading Paul Theroux

If you haven’t yet had the great pleasure of reading Paul Theroux’s new book, “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star,” put it at the top of your to-read list. To my mind, it’s Theroux’s best book since his trailblazing “The Great Railway Bazaar,” and in fact, in “Ghost Train” Theroux sets out to retrace the [...]

Book Passage Reflections

Well, the 17th annual Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference has come and gone in a five-day blur. The first day was actually a “pre-conference” day-long writing workshop I led exploring the wonders ancient and modern of San Francisco’s Chinatown. That was a great adventure and I think we all learned that you don’t [...]

Book Passage Conference: Adventures in Travel Writing

One of the highlights of my year, the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference, is coming up this Thursday through Sunday. Every August about 120 students and 30 faculty gather in Corte Madera, near San Francisco, for four days of workshops, panels, events and informal gatherings. It’s like summer camp for travel writers and [...]

Literary trio

Next Monday Simon Winchester is coming to town! This completes an extraordinary literary trifecta of Tim Cahill, Pico Iyer and Simon Winchester in less than a week — one more reason why the Bay Area is such a blessed place. Simon will be here to read from and promote his new book “The Man Who [...]

Adventures in writing

An abundance of authors! In about three hours I’m leaving to meet with the wonderful Pico Iyer, another longtime friend who is in the Bay Area promoting his new book on the Dalai Lama, “The Open Road.” It’s an incisive, poignant, inspiring book that manages to paint an intricately multi-faceted portrait of the Dalai Lama. Pico [...]

Wide world of adventures

Tonight I had the great honor and pleasure to host an on-stage conversation with the inimitable Tim Cahill at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco — and that seems like a perfect way to begin this blog, on stage with the pre-eminent literary adventure travel writer of our time. Near the end of our conversation, [...]