What's the Hook?

Here I am, back in school, taking a class on travel writing.  My assignment is to create a blog.  I've never created a blog before, and I must admit I've little experience with travel writing...until this week.  It feels like a bit of a crash course, but this, I've learned is the nature of summer classes.  Not that I mind.  I fear the cobwebs have invaded my brain these last few years;  I've written hundreds of lesson plans, a couple of songs, one angry guest opinion about how my school district lays off teachers every spring, but travel writing, no, not unless you count letters to friends back home, written in a rattling Ford Econoline Van trundling across West Texas in the dead of night in a mad rush to get to the East Coast to play Irish Conjunto music.  Well, actually, you can count that.

This first week of class we've been focusing on the history of travel writing.  Travel writing bloomed after the Renaissance in Europe, and while there was a shortage of Ford Econoline Vans in those days, they did have ships to take them across the seas, horse drawn carriages and various beasts of burden. Robert Louis Stevenson, famously, traveled with a donkey.  I can't help but wonder how the company of a donkey would compare with four other temperamental musicians, but it's best I steer clear of such musings.  I have vowed to temper my own partiality, or at least be honest about it.

The early travel writers didn't always manage to hide their partiality and notions of cultural superiority.  According to a piece we read for class by Joan Pau Rubies entitled, "Travel Writing and Ethnography," mapping the world and its cultures was a huge part of travel writing's early history.  Missionaries learned native languages and customs with the goal of spreading Christianity.  Explorers were often employed to learn about native cultures for the purpose of colonization and trade.  There was also a curiosity that grew out of the period of Enlightenment "which often informed specific debates - about the capabilities and origins of the American Indians, the definition of 'natural man', the influence of climate on national characteristics, or the existence of stages in the history of civilisation."  I suppose it best I refrain from describing the characteristics of drummers or imparting my opinions of   various  musicians, concert promoters and nightclub owners in  the rungs  of civilization.

Modern travel writing has moved beyond a quest for discovering new cultures and cataloging them.  The world has become a smaller place with technology: television, radio, the internet, and the mouth watering purveyors of culture, The Food Channel and The Travel Channel.  James Clifford in his talk, "Travel and Translation in the Twentieth Century" speaks of how it is impossible to isolate one culture from another, "Natives, people confined to and by the places to which they belong, groups unsullied by contact with a larger world, have probably never existed."  They certainly do not exist today.  So where does that leave the modern travel writer?  Who is her audience?  Where is her niche?  Because of the proliferation of information in today's culture, travel writers, like most professionals have to specialize.

And that leads me to my little blog.  In the words of my middle school language arts students, "What should I write about, Miss?"  My writing background is that of a songwriter.  What does a song have that could transfer to a travel blog?  A hook, perhaps: that magic line that pulls you in and gets you humming?  Runaway Jane, a blog we looked at in our class this week, seeks to hook her young audiences with a hip voice and a knowledge of youth oriented budget travel.

Jane Watson, in her story, "Where the Roads Diverged," combined memoir and travel writing in a piece about her youth and what led her to become a travel writer. (The Best American Travel Writing, Houghton Mifflin, 2008).  What I enjoyed about Watson's piece was that it told a story.  It wasn't just a list of sights and impressions. Memoir is often a key element of song lyrics as well, a telling detail, a memory, an image that sets the scene and creates the mood.  My favorite songs are narrative ballads.  I like the ones with a strong character and voice.  Perhaps that should be my focus, for now, as I begin my journey, literally and figuratively, as a travel blogger.

"Sit write down and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip..."  
 from The Ballad of Gilligan's Island, by George Wyle and Sherwood Shwartz