The Best American Travel Writing 2016

Bill Bryson and Jason Wilson, editors. The Best American Travel Writing 2016. NY: Mariner, 2016.

Do you know about the "Best American" serieses? There's an annual Best American Essays, a Best American Science and  Nature Writing, Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Writing, and my favorite, Best American Travel Writing. Reading these collections is a great way to sample authors (if you like the essay, investigate the books they've written or look for more essays), and keep up on current writing in your favorite literary genre. I have a stack of Best American Travels (and the occasional other genre) at home, and while I can't claim to have read them all, I've read parts of some

and all of others. Part of the beauty of anthologies for me is that I feel no reader's guilt for not reading the whole book cover-to-cover. I preorder BATW  every year because I love reading travel essays, I write travel essays, and the series editor, Jason Wilson, was my writing mentor while I studied for my MFA in writing. His introduction to the collection is always fun to read, and without a doubt the guest editor's introduction or foreword will be quality writing as well. This year's guest editor is the hilarious Bill Bryson. And then I savor each and every essay. Even if I wasn't travel writing myself, I would be enamored with these essays. Who doesn't want to learn about places they haven't been?

Just before I began reading Best American Travel Writing 2016, I read a writing craft essay by Ann Hood about literary first lines in Tin House’s Writer’s Notebook II. She describes a first line as a hand extended by the writer to the reader. That’s a genteel way of thinking about a hook! I picked up Best American Travel Writing 2016 and studied the first lines in that collection. I chose my favorites, not necessarily by my favorite authors:

Dave Eggers: “The year I turned 43, I woke up one morning and thought it would be a good day to go to Hollister.”

Pico Iyer: “The foreign has long been my stomping ground, my sanctuary, as one who grew up a foreigner wherever I happened to be.”

Helen MacDonald: “I’m walking beside a hedge of tangled dog roses in a nature preserve in eastern England, toward a hide, a building whose purpose it is to make me disappear.”

Jeffrey Tayler: “Tens of thousands of dragooned serfs perished while draining the swamps to lay the foundation of St. Petersburg, and residents like to remind visitors that their city, enchanting though it may be, ‘rests on bones’.”

Eggers and Tayler’s lines simply intrigued me, Tayler with fanciful language and Eggers with a familiar (but not really) place name. Iyer’s idea of the foreigner connected with my own self-diagnosed outlier status. MacDonald’s hide reminded me of the hides on my favorite birdwatching trails and how tempting they are to stand in and not be seen. All four authors put out a hand and drew me in.

Reviewing the lines after reading the essays, I noticed that my list of favorites had altered slightly, influenced by the stories they evoked in my mind. For example, Thomas Chatterton Williams’s line, “My father, a bookish black man old enough to be my grandfather, grew up in Texas while it was still a segregated state.” On the surface, this line gives us information about the essay: they are black, from Texas, and his father is much older (like mine) and remembers that state when it was much different. That’s a lot of information for one sentence. After I read the essay and realized that his ‘expert’ was Jake Lamar who I know (another writing mentor), I was very interested in the story. I’m not black, or a man, or living in Paris, but I feel like I have a good idea of what it must be like from reading this essay.

Here’s my assessment from this informal first-line study: before reading the essays, I liked best the first-lines that pulled me in with imagery, fanciful or familiar. After reading the essays, I still liked those, but appreciated the first-lines that signaled the content of the essay to follow. Some did both. I want my first lines to do both.

My other takeaway from this collection is a broadening definition of ‘travel’ writing. I think of a travel story as the recounting of a trip with a beginning and an end. Perhaps the writer includes the ‘getting there’ and the ‘going home’ or perhaps not. The protagonist in William Finnegan’s “Off Diamond Head” moves to Hawaii with his family as a child. I enjoyed the surf talk, related to the ocean’s moods, and appreciated the use of TV show titles to set the time. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had gone to a place and were going to be left there. It was more of a story of a sense of place than a travel story. This is not a bad thing as it made for a contrast to the essays about a finite trip. I’m intrigued—can I do this? Can I write about a place that I don’t actually leave at the end and call it travel? 

Pico Iyer’s “The Foreign Spell” is the most perfect essay in the collection. I bestow this honor based on his elegant writing and the piece’s satisfying form, but most of all because of his thorough explanation of his concept of being foreign. I get it and I can relate. Helen McDonald’s “Hiding from Animals” is my first-runner-up. I wrote this in the margin: “I wish I wrote this.” She thoroughly described the joys and frustrations of watching animals that I feel out in nature with my camera and binoculars. She transported me to my favorite spots. 

As a person who is known to do a bit of research and inflict it upon my readers, I appreciated the researched meat that D.T. Max added to “A Cave with a View” as he balanced the old and new in Matera. Tony Perrottet amplified his story “Darwin’s Forgotten World” with research throughout. One of these days I’ll read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, but until I do I’ll be needing some explanation. Perrottet supplied that and more. Related to research is authenticity which seems to be Patrick Symmes’s concern in “Peak Havana.” He made it clear that what we see in the travel literature is not exactly an accurate portrayal of the real Cuba. I would like to see for myself.

Since I spent time with first lines, I made sure to note the best last lines and conclusions. Alice Gregory gave us a personal revelation in “Climb Every Mountain,” and David Rowell admitted that actually playing the hang was not all he imagined it would be in “Swiss Dream.” Helen McDonald’s nature-watching ending finished off that piece nicely for me, encouraging the reader to slow down and spend the time to appreciate nature. The most powerful ending for me is Justin Nobel’s in “Growing Old with the Inuit.” After a deft synthesis of his journey, the unfamiliar culture of Inuit aged, and his quotidian experience with his grandfather he ends with:

We are holding hands on the couch. I want to carry him up a holy mountain, abandon him on an ice floe, stab him in the heart, but I don’t have the guts. Those days are indeed over. There will be no ring of rocks, and everyone has forgotten their favorite tool. These days, the world over, we die on our couches.