The Way of Wanderlust Read Free

career path emerged. And so, as winter thawed into spring and the question-filled future arose once more, I followed my wanderlust and applied for a two-year Princeton-in-Asia Fellowship. Miraculously, I won and was awarded a position teaching at International Christian University in Tokyo.
    Before leaving for Japan, through some polite and persistent letter-writing, I was able to meet with a few magazine editors in New York, and I brought my Kilimanjaro story with me as a writing sample. To my astonishment, when I arrived in Tokyo in September, a telegram was waiting for me from one of these, the Travel Editor at Mademoiselle magazine. It read: “A hole opened up in our November issue and we put your Kilimanjaro story in it. Hope you don’t mind.”
    That was my first published travel article.
    Over the ensuing two years, I continued to write poetry, but I also began keeping copious journals, writing long letters, and absorbing as much travel information and experience as I could. I wrote two articles for the Japan Airlines inflight magazine and a couple more for other Asia-based publications, and then I was given an assignment by Travel & Leisure . At the same time, I ventured throughout Japan and on to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. And perhaps most important, I began to explore and frame the world with a travel writer’s mind.
    When that fellowship ended and the future stretched directionless once more, I felt drawn by the enlightened, cosmopolitan atmosphere of San Francisco, and moved there without home or plan. A few months later, through an extraordinary series of serendipities, I was hired as a Travel Writer by the San Francisco Examiner to replace the Travel Editor while she took a one-year leave of absence.
    That was my first real job, and travel writing has been my profession ever since. Through the decades I’ve broadened from newspaper to online and book publishing, and I’ve incorporated editing, teaching, speaking, consulting, tour leading, and being a spokesperson into my professional portfolio, but travel writing has always remained at the core of what I do and who I am.
    In the thirty-eight years since that first Kilimanjaro piece was published, I have written more than 700 articles for some two dozen print and online publications. I’ve also edited ten anthologies of literary travel writing, and written a guide to becoming a travel writer. But I’ve never published a collection of my own travel pieces.
    So I was thrilled and honored when the wonderful folks at Travelers’ Tales approached me about compiling a selection of my writing. At first the task seemed daunting, but as I read through those hundreds of articles, a few stood out as having a particularly powerful sense of personal engagement, and of focusing on the inner as well as the outer journey.
    Aided by the editorial acumen and invigorating energy of Candace Rose Rardon, the talented writer and artist who created the enchanting cover illustrations, maps, and icons that grace this book, I winnowed these finalists down to the stories that compose the final collection.
    These pieces cover a broad spectrum. Chronologically, they range from that first story about Kilimanjaro, which was published in 1977, to an article that appeared in 2015. Geographically, they roam from my childhood home in Connecticut, through my temporary homelands in France, Greece, and Japan, to my current home in California, stopping in twenty countries on six continents en route. The world of publishing is widely represented as well, with fourteen print and online outlets included.
    Once we’d selected these stories, we still had to decide how to organize them. After contemplating a number of methods—by decade, publication, publishing medium, geographical setting, narrative message—we realized that the pieces seemed to fall organically into three themed sections: