I wrote travel articles for regional AAA travel magazines in the Upper Midwest for several years, and I still recall with a mix of embarrassment and pride my very first article, on my favorite childhood myth, "Paul Bunyan's Footsteps." The embarrassment came from trying to take printable photos. I took only one roll of film--I later was to discover that seventy or eighty pictures is a necessary minimum from which one chooses some twenty to actually show an editor--and had them developed as slides. Worse yet, I used a cheap fixed-lens camera and had no idea that the positive of each slide would be the size of a thumbnail. The editor very graciously said nothing about the slides and simply hired an artist to draw a sketch of Paul and his blue ox, Babe. The pride came from the writing. I wrote a simple but moving account of a week my family spent following the trail of the mythic Paul Bunyan. We saw a talking statue of Paul which both awed and frightened my children, visited amusement parks and tourists' logging camps, and followed Bunyaniana in several small Minnesota towns. The highlight was camping in the Paul Bunyan State Forest, a place of pristine beauty and solitude with a great number of small, round and oval lakes that, I explained to my children (and my readers), seemed just like Paul and Babe's original footprints as the two strode across these lands.
As I wrote this and other travel articles, I gradually discovered that the key to writing successfully was emotion: not only making readers feel they were there but also making them experience my own moments of ecstasy and delight. I gradually found, for example, that writing responses simultaneous with my experiences was not only faster and more efficient, but also led to significantly more powerful emotional narrative. My words were better shaped by the immediate emotion and aesthetic than by the shadow of my recall. Through understanding the key that emotion played in writing and reading my travel articles, I also came to perceive that readers wanted a vicarious experience. Thus my storytelling was more important than factual accuracy, as long as I did not deviate from "reality." I began much more consciously to use storytelling elements just as do narrative essay writers. This meant the development of personal experiences into mythic dimensions of emotion and event.
By the end of my several years as a travel writer, I understood that my most important job was to develop myth: travel writers create, build, and sustain minor and major myths that supply each generation of readers with its own understandings, assumptions, and romances about places both faraway and near. Writing myth also changed the dimensions of my own travel and even of my day-to-day perceptions as I travelled. I consciously set out on the road to discover and build the kinds of exciting, moving, eventful stories we all like to tell, and I embraced much more intensely the moments of emotional and aesthetic pleasure as my family and I travelled. I now see myth making as a great part of the power of travel writing, a power that changes not only readers but also writers as they write. I also perceive travel writers as powerful contributors to the myths by which each generation--locally, regionally, and nationally--lives.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.